Thingness

New Filing Cabinet

2008-03-16T22:04:00.001-07:00

www.marksussman.org

Door and Knob

2007-11-10T13:28:00.001-08:00

In the office there is a room Alice has never entered. It has a doorknob and hinges, and Alice walks by it on her way to the copy room. If Alice bothers to do the math, she will figure out that, given its distance from other known rooms and the distance of room's door to the oft-trodden hallway that runs behind the the room, plus the known distance of the floor to the ceiling, the room must be less than or equal to fifteen feet in length, twelve feet in depth, and seven-and-a-half feet in height. If she bothers to ask her co-workers what is inside the room, they will quickly change the subject. If she tries the handle, it will not turn. If she knocks, there will be no echo - her knuckle's thud will die before leaving the door's wood. If she works late one evening, dragging her bones across the keyboard for hours past the cleaning woman's last round, she will think she hears an incantation just penetrating the door to the room. The language will be strange, but she will have no doubt that its words are directed at her. If she hears the murmured language, she will get closer, and she will know its murmur and rustle is for her. When there are silences between the mutters, she will know those are for her as well. Still, if she happens upon the door late at night, when she should be home replacing her marrow, she will not try the knob, though she has some glimmer of what's behind it. She will know that it will not open.

Some Trees and Some Crackers

2007-10-12T14:11:00.000-07:00

Recall a game you played as a child: you put your hands on a tree, close your eyes, and count to one hundred. You open them, turn around, and your friends are gone, so you go home and eat starchy snacks. Alice works in the office that clarifies and enforces corporate policies for the workers that manufacture and distribute such snacks. Because of her efforts, little yellow crackers have, in your mind, become synonymous with "quality." Alice pops her knuckles and the world becomes visible just over the tiny, cheese-flavored horizon of the cracker's edge. Your memories are governed by rules, like any other branch of the company. Alice makes sure everything runs smoothly, the olfactory sensations kick in just so, you open a box of crackers, you feel bark beneath your fingertips, you see a wisp of adolescent fabric shrink from the corner of your vision, and the world of the trees disappears as you count, one, two, three ...

Disposable Skin

2007-09-04T07:34:00.000-07:00

The season begins in hope and slowly unravels until only its cork'd center remains. Alice has nothing left to show for her tribulations -- she has buried the silverware, she has wrapped the baby hamsters in plastic and sent them floating down the river in hopes that they might find themselves adopted by the pharoah. They were prized once; an infusion of royal blood will set their little hearts pumping. In a possible future, their organs sit beneath the earth's surface in mason jars stalked by snakes.

Alice lives in a quiet, suburban pile of rubble. Every morning she sweeps part of it away, binds her bones together in rubber bands and heads to work in disposable skin, a paisely flesh she bought off the rack. Co-workers find themselves hypnotized as Alice's lungs expand, as she weazes out clouds off ash. Her forearms sit limp on her desk for most of the day. Her pancreas splurts bile and the office explodes into applause. Not much work gets done, the company's going under, but the Workers With Disabilities Act protects what remains of Alice's ravaged frame. She pours milk over romain lettuce and goes face first into lunch. Her hands flop about, semi-autonomous and clacking against office-desk material. Around three, when swirls of humans clot the coffee rooms, Alice's skin begins to flake and peel. She spills fluid as she jangles toward the door at the end of the day. Frank is a pervert, but he takes pity on her and shuts down her computer, as her clicking finger does not click, but bounces uncontrollably.

When she returned to the office after the fire, everyone applauded her mutilation with flavorful martinis. They chucked her on the chin like her father. They lashed their sadness to Viking boats, but could not spark the flint in that kind of weather. They sit, forever docked, ready to burn, and so they celebrate Alice, returned from Elysian Fields with an every-changing array of tarps holding her insides inside, a gift from the Gods.

Sense of an Ending

2007-07-24T11:23:00.000-07:00

Alice finishes the final installment of J.K. Rowlings's Harry Potter series and feels a lingering sadness. It's over and so is her childhood. Boo-hoo, thinks Alice. At least she still has witchcraft. So she grinds a wooden stake into the middle of the putrescent carpetting in her living room, douses the place in lemon vodka, and has her formerly sunny disposition bind her to the wood as she ignites a spark using only her profound understanding of spatial relationships. As the flames consume her, she despairs, realizes it's no consolation, and tattoos her now-ashy skeleton with the same twisted pattern that adorns her ex-bride's face. Sitting in the living room's smoking remains, she ponders transmigration's metric weight, its proper accenting, utters the word, and, as if in an underwhelming dream, the television turns on. A blind horse gnaws peanut butter and appears to talk. Alice mouths some words too, it doesn't matter which ones. She and horse are speaking the same language. The horse's show ends, but Alice's jaw keeps working, the hinges creaking, soot falling like pencil-scratched lead residue.

Alice Takes A Bride

2007-07-06T20:11:00.000-07:00

Rather than concede that, yes, a corpse is the totality rather than the excess of life, Alice gave in to a life-long fantasy and bought a mail-order bride.

The bride arrived two weeks later, still frazzled from the whirlwind cab ride to the airport, then the plane ride with two layovers, then the cab ride to Alice's apartment. Alice took her inside and attempted to make the bride a sandwich, but the bride simply looked at her as if to say, "Not without a ring." Alice pulled off a ring and slid it onto the bride's finger, which seemed to placate her, though the bride's cyrillic mutterings could well have been annoyed talk about home and hearth and such. Alice made a sandwich of various pig parts, and the bride ate it happily, despite her culturally acquired dietary restrictions.

After the bride finished eating the sandwich, a kind of silence fell over the kitchen. Alice picked up the plate, carried it to the sink, and rinsed it off. There was a kind of humming that was always present in the kitchen, and Alice tried to think of a gesture that would express the phrase, "Sorry about the humming, there's nothing I can do about it." Nothing leaped to mind. Alice looked at the bride and realized that she was humming along with the humming sound, humming at exactly the same pitch as the whatever machine in the kitchen's bowels generated that noise. Alice took it as a sign, or omen, or something - a sound preordained, some perverse sphere song. This Russian broad was really something, something mythically tuned-in to the house.

Alice climbed the staircase and the bride followed her, and the door closed behind them, and they both made noises that, thinking back, were pretty hilarious.

The Hyper-Condensed Pocket of Pure Distance

2007-06-23T13:23:00.001-07:00

There was some kind of distance carried by the air. Alice moved down the sidewalk from concrete square to square, but everything around her carried some kind of space within it. She moved forward one step and found herself in the middle of a hyper-compressed pocket of what seemed like pure distance. Everything was, I don't know, really far away seeming, and the next chunk of concrete slunk horizon-wise as she approached it.

A curious feeling, she thought, moving through totally unoccupied, utterly vacuous space, while nothing around her moved. She walked forward, but the trees stood their ground, refused to fall behind her. She could not cross to the next chunk, even as she pushed forward. The hyper-condensed pocket of pure distance totally enveloped her. She turned left and ran, and still, though she was certainly moving, she was not going anywhere. There was a weirdly uneven temperature, and as she ran and ran, though the sky was clear and the colors sharp around her, she passed through shifting climates, cold patches and gelatinous globs of amniotic warmth.

Alice just kept moving. What the fuck else was she supposed to do?

The Poets

2007-06-16T18:20:00.000-07:00

Alice decides to approach things as though everything were more or less over. The night is still and underfucked, a tree in the back yard does absolutely nothing. She looks out the back window, but it's dark outside and light where she is, and all she sees is herself where the outside should be. She grits her teeth and strains her neck. Her lips peel off her teeth and her neck cords strain against her skin and her eyes are open very wide. Everything is more or less over anyway, so who cares what she looks like? There is a table and a chair in the background and her lips peel off of her teeth and her neck cords strain against her neck.

She wonders what someone would think, someone walking into the room like they belong there. They would think, "Hey, there's Alice staring at the window," or, "Alice looks like a test pilot in a wind tunnel," or they would note simply note the most relevant fact, that the night was underfucked and looked it. This person would then make a sandwich and retire for the evening, leaving Alice at the window, her neck cords straining at her neck.

Historically, Gods have had insatiable and varied sexual appetites, and the poets have depicted their various fuckings and awkward morning metamorphoses. Alice recognizes that looking at the whole situation as if it were already over might offer some possibility for poetry, whereas the scene itself, her straining at her own skin and trying desperately to get the tree in the backyard in her sights, is merely a present reality, subject to breathing's sustenance and just the ho-hum of a churning body. Somehow, afterwards, if she were a God, the poets would get a hold of her and then the window, the sandwich ... that would be something.

W.A.S.P.

2007-06-16T14:05:00.001-07:00

I spent the morning trying to crush a wasp with a broom. It lighted on a curtain in the kitchen and stabbed downward at nothing at all, which might as well have been my face. If I puff up and my cheeks fill with blood and pus, just open the window and I'll float out and out of your life, and you can wonder if the wind has blown me toward the hospital, or further into the territory. When the swelling goes down, I'll return and do you the courtesy of a proper answer: yes, it was the hospital, and now my blood is in a jar on a shelf and my skin is antibiotic. I'll come home and the wasp will flit and light and so on, and eventually I'll pick its body from the broom needles.

The Hinges

2007-06-09T13:01:00.001-07:00

While humming along to the tupperware burps' satisfied stomach sound, Alice realized that this world's endless ostinato could give no quarter to the rabid critter burgeoning in her. So rather than gas, rather than pills to stop the floppy-eared Κέρβερος from loosing itself on the world, she went to her garage, and dusted off a six-sided crate covered in pre-war ewe droppings that a Sinti hairdresser had given her two-time amputee cum laude father in exchange for a workable definition of the holy ghost. The box's hinges, of which it had thirteen, had rusted open years earlier, and Alice remembered miserable weekend cleaning excursions devoted specifically to crushing the spiders and thwacking away at the top of the box - she tried for eighteen years to loose the metal coils with force, when she found out later that all you had to do was rub a dove on it and it would cackle.

But, standing in front of the box in her garage, feeling that something licking the backs of her eyeballs with its dog-haired tongue, she knew the box, firm and opinionated, would not open. Not even the multivalent logics of mammal-based physics would coax it open. She stood, the tupperware belching, the ewe drops aglow, her eyeballs tongued by an oxygen starved-something, and she slapped at the top of the box. But it would not open. She read the fable about the fox and the grapes, and then the one about Achilles and the tortoise (though she didn't finish it), and then mispronounced "Koran" as "Qu'ran." Exhausted after four days of trying to remember the melody to The Pelican Brief's opening credits, she finally devolved into telling stories about her life, like the dream-substance she saw embodied in Lenny Bruce's post-OD ass smiling up from the bathroom tile and the metaphysical dilemma it provoked in her father before the war, and the first time she saw a racist hug a lemon tree. She sat in the corner, knees pulled to her chest, arms wrapped around shins, sucking at her own teeth, and peered around the pile of discarded high school yearbooks at the box with its infinitely chaste dove-greased hinges.

Finally, the tupperware all but exhausted, the thing licking her eyeballs now complacent, knowing it was only a matter of time, she relented and, heaving her body up from the floor, pendulum arms swaying as she lumbered forth, she moved toward the box. It took hours, but navigating the viscous air-conditioning and the Hellfire Club decoder rings, she came to it and sat down beside it. She gave her teeth a suck, and a piece of broccoli left over from the Cuban Missile Crisis ceased its mourning. She reached over and worked her finger nails between two wooden panels, heir entry aided by the ewe droppings which, though tough on the outside, yielded an oily xylem once broken. She pulled and a panel came off. And she pulled again and another panel came off. And she pulled again. And she pulled again. And she pulled again, revealing the box's contents, of which there were none. The bad dog behind her eyes began its screaming and she could feel its paw pushing out, distorting her skull's delicate contours into bulgy hillocks. And jaws snapping interior brain air. Still she kept pulling and pulling, and soon only the lid floated before her, the virginal hinges still clamped, holding tight to the wood and also nothing at all except air.

Her hands moved fast around the lid, and already a dog mouth was making its way out of Alice's mouth and it pushed pornographically out and out. She had only the frame of the lid left, its hexagonal outline still attached to the hinges, and she pulled away at that as she tasted dog snot. She pulled down hard on the last plank and it came free. The hinges floated in the air for a moment, and then they opened with a snap. The tupperware was quiet, though filled with a kind of burnt-plastic vomit. The hinges fell to the ground and they clinked on the ground and were still. The dog was still, it closed its eyes, its torso hanging halfway out of Alice's mouth. The dog and Alice fell to the ground, and she put her hand over the hinges, and the hinges were stuck there between skin and the cold garage floor.

Prize Fighter Endeavors to Start a Flower Shop, But Then Just Punches Someone Instead

2007-06-04T20:00:00.000-07:00

Yes, objects that go into their concepts always leave behind a remainder, an obscene protrusion into a alogical world - this is to say that objects always give their concepts the finger, but behind concepts' backs.

Yes, there is more thingness, there is always more thingness. There is always more thingness than you can handle, because things are giving you the finger behind your back. The tragedy, some philosopher said, is that you don't know what the finger looks like.

Give up on things? Before you go totally internal, they've given up on you, even before the always already. They piss on "always already." They're always already "always already," but even more so.

Give up on things? Who the fuck do you think you are?

Darker, Darker

2007-01-02T22:02:00.001-08:00

http://www.movingbyremotecontrol.blogspot.com

My Business Plan Is Immaculate

2006-11-24T21:50:00.000-08:00

What the FUCK

I'm no longer given over to excursus or tangential tangents - I'm thinking about Gertrude Stein repeating a bunch of things over and over - But not exactly repeating them: compounding them - Her verbosity is the most concise.

The blank page is always a blank page, even if it has writing on it.

A blank page is never a blank page, it is always a palimpsest.

For a few weeks, when I was fifteen or sixteen years old, I had two words stuck in my head like a song: "grain silo." I don't know where I heard them, but they were there for weeks on end like the residue from a halogen bulb after you close your eyes - faintly humming, layered over every other thing. Particularly at night, I whispered those words to myself, they were coming out of my lungs weighted equally with the air. And then one day I forgot about them, and now they are phallic towers in midwestern flatlands. Now they are places where farm girls lose their virginity and hunched over ex-scarecrows go to vote - they're in washed-out gray tones and I don't sleep with them anymore.

Dead Academics

2006-10-19T21:46:00.000-07:00

This strikes me as odd: Michael Berube's new book Rhetorical Occasions.. Note the cover. Really, really unusual for an academic to make it onto the cover of his own book, even if that academic is as prominent as Berube. Unusual, of course, unless that academic is dead. Creepy.

Oh, and you can go to Berube's blog, where he is probably writing about you even as we speak.

A Tumbler Full Of Rocks

2006-10-15T20:49:00.000-07:00

The time was more or less right. We gave up our hopes for burgeoning limbs and set out one-footed into the Westchester lights, the crowd-breath at our back, and t-shirts cut and rearranged as sails. It was summer-autumn, lodged at the top of the turnover point of the day's last second, we teetered, subdividing seconds into halves and halves of halves, until we could no longer resist the fall. It was the quarter of our resurrection and we stumbled forward, the crowd-sighs gliding us forward and forward. The autumn was autumnal, and thus it fulfilled its promise.

Draining the Tributaries

2006-10-07T21:42:00.000-07:00

I get off of the train and a crowd from a Queens-bound F Train is pouring down the train. I can feel the wind from the pressure shift, and I wonder if I can catch the train about to pull out of the station, but then also I'm thinking, My God, all of these people have had sex. Ok, not all of them, but like 95% of these people have had sex before - especially because it's around 3:00 and most of the people coming down the stairs look like either the type of people who don't have to work that much (lots of time for sex) or students of some kind (ditto, maybe).

There are a few who look downturned, I'll say harassed maybe, but their harassments are leisurely - these are the harassments of dry cleaning not being ready, or bad service at a restaurant, as opposed to the kind of harassments that come from .gov email addresses. And to them I say, good for you for not being virgins.

Pedagogical Devices

2006-10-01T20:04:00.000-07:00

Things I Have Said To My Students So Far This Semester:

1. It's like when you leave the house without brushing your teeth. You know something's wrong, but you don't know what it is until you see the bus coming.

2. I don't want to grade your finals.

3. Because you're late. All the time.

4. Just pretend that Barbara Ehrenreich is a murderer.

5. Yeah, you should check out some Norman Mailer. He's good. And he's an asshole.

6. Ok, well answer this question, then: is it early, or am I just totally boring?

7. No. Nope. Really close. Uh ... no. Yes.

8. Obviously the physical thing is not working out for me.

9. This is the Newton end of things. I just thought you should know.

10. Candid teacher moment. So, uh, are you guys learning anything?

Losing: An Interrogation

2006-09-28T21:38:00.002-07:00

INTRLCTR: And you dislike it?

PSajak: Yes.

INTRLCTR: It doesn't feel good?

PSajak: No. Not even for a second.

INTRLCTR: When you take it away?

PSajak: No. I would give it all away. I would give everything away if I could.

INTRLCTR: You're a generous man.

PSajak: I'm not generous. I'm nothing. Everything is contingent, which is as bad as predestination, when you think about it. Absolute and total human freedom, sure, but what does that get you when the world of human thought and action is composed of a nearly infinite series of contact points, each of them subject to pressure from a whole range of different forces at any given moment? Ideological, physical, interpersonal, egotistic, and so on. This is as bad as total anarchy. Absolute freedom, yes, but what does is it come to, is what I'm asking. There's no real decision when you are subject to so many others, and so many other things, that are decided all around you, constantly.

INTRLCTR: But there is salvation on the smallest human scale, right? If only by reconciling with ourselves these forces. Surrender can become a kind of victory, as long we're willing to concede that the battle was lost before we ever had a chance.

PSajak: Typical bourgeois attitude. We never had a chance, so why be sore about it? Fuck you. You don't know the shit I've seen, the loss I've witnessed. The human soul sifting through the sieve of a body too caught up in the vacillations of chance to notice its own depletion.

INTRLCTR: That was very poetic.

PSajak: You don't know the shit I've seen.

INTRLCTR: Well, you are syndicated.

PSajak: The syndicate ...

Through a Gnarls, Barkley

2006-09-07T22:01:00.000-07:00

Now is the time to put away childish things.

Except for this blog.

Grad school's started - as close to the literal vise-on-the-brain as I'll get without actually putting my brain in a vise. It's not so much the readings, or the classes, but the pressure of the ether, the intoxicating smell of work clouding the hallways (in which I always get lost - my school is labyrinthine).

I find that William James, who suffered bouts of anxiety and a couple of nervous breakdowns, is an incredibly appropriate first reading.

Aesthetics, thanks for making the world.

LOGOSrhetoricPARALYSISvomit

2006-09-04T22:10:00.000-07:00

There is no better way to say this, so I will just say it the way it was told to me.

Last night, I paid for my coffee with some stray jacks, a ball of twine, and a jar of nails, when it struck me all at once that this was in fact the utopia I had been looking for since leaving home some five years earlier. The economic castration and ill-painted dormitory replica furniture - it's milk crate sheen lusted over by fawning middle-weight girlfight horsetrainers - these were the revisions and plasterings-on-walls for which we had paid with several spare organs. It landed me in the stocks in Town Square and I came away with tomato on my face and a heavy load in my genes. That night we paid with some cartoon bits of barter - yeah, and IT WAS ALL..............RIGHT MAN!!!! Thanks, capitalism - your essentially sunny outlook has taught me this: while we're all chained to the shitting post, at least we can sell our neighbor's own fetters back to him for a 40% profit!

AU REVOIR, you fucking coffee guy!!!!!!!!!

andafteralliwasastillbirthnotbadforadamnedspoteh?

Use Your Protrusion

2006-08-20T21:07:00.000-07:00

The one-year passed without ceremony. From the bowels of a snack-food corporate office this blog was shat out upon the world, and you, so like a pack of stray dogs, sniffed it with disinterest, occasionally courting its disease with your tongue.

Thanks for reading.

An Arabesque is Exactly Arabian

2006-08-10T20:53:00.000-07:00

Currently heat vaporizes thought and pixel as well - everything gets sucked up into the sun and now my words go too. Biofeedback is taking all of the juice and turning it into more juice - BUT WE'RE RUNNING AT A LOSS HERE PEOPLE and business is business. A body is not a corporation - luckily.

Pitchfork Music Festival was fun, despite the airline moebius stripping.

My temp gig ends tomorrow, a week earlier than expected. Anybody's got some spare cash floating around, I spackle and dance for paper. Not all at once.

Epistle to Van Dyke Parks

2006-07-26T19:36:00.000-07:00

Lacerated on the fjords, I saw your word jumble set to brain-print by an unfortunate tumble and comical run-in with a horn'd goat. All Good Things Come Again.

Also, I have another piece up at Printculture.

Stay tuned for more inscrutable prose concerning Philip Glass, Kronos Quartet and Dracula and also the Pitchfork Music Festival.

Not a Seymour - Stop Insinuating

2006-07-25T22:24:00.000-07:00

It's come to my attention that, if you're viewing the RSS feed of this blog, every post for the last few months has ended with the sentence, "You've been fed, Audrey." I don't know why that happens, but it's not me. I've ended every post with, "When I hear the word 'culture,' I reach for my brownies. Because they're delicious." Now that's what I call unimpeachable.

Syllepsis, the New New Anti-Drug

2006-07-24T19:57:00.000-07:00

While the komodo dragon's tail can strike with enough force to break a man's legs, only its cold indifference can break my heart.

It's Slower Than You Think, and It Is Right Behind You

2006-07-23T09:37:00.000-07:00

We were in the car, and I looked around at the pack of rats flitting in between the tires, squeaking, keeping pace with the vehicle. These new high-velocity rodents are both a wonder and a travesty, I thought, fondling my sandwich. There is hope for the future, when the rats catch up and slither in through the vents.

Conjunction Junction, You've Outlived Your Own Usefulness!

2006-07-11T21:36:00.000-07:00

There's only one thing worse than a writer who doesn't write, and that's a writer who erases stuff he's already written.

ManManManManManManManManManMan

2006-06-29T22:19:00.000-07:00

Man Man's set at Webster Hall a sort of mock-primal ritualistic front for just banging out some soul music on a good, old-fashioned Fender Rhodes. The band performs in a kind of clump - which I approve of, though main Man Man Honus still sits front and center, though drummer Chris Powell faces him directly, daring the front man to send the drummer to be back of the stage. That's part of what makes Man Man fun on a more cerebral level - the breaking down, or ignoring of, certain boundary lines - instrumental hierarchies (vocals of central importance, then guitars, then drums, then bass) dissolve - the band performs in a mass, the members switch instruments, bang on tire rims, cans, bang on the stage, scream, writhe, and babble. You get the feeling they would play the audience if they could - they're painted up like some generic tribe of somebodies, red and white lines under their eyes for virility, I guess. And given the showiness of it all, it's seems like it would be easy to cry irony and dismiss. But it's not, the frenzied atmosphere on stage, the falling-all-over-the-instruments and jumping, whooping, the seemingly unnecessary double-saxophone honking, it's not ironic at all. It's spontaneous and cathartic and all of the things rock and roll was supposed to be decades before you were born. Except it's not that either, because they're so tight that you come to realize that it's all rehearsed. Which, if that undercuts the ecstasies, well, fine - it's still a hell of a show.

Product Review: Sparks Plus

2006-06-17T17:53:00.000-07:00

I got a promotional can of this stuff - a paltry 10 ouncer. In retrospect, downing it all in a matter of minutes was an act of hubris. Just that much was like an all-night binge compressed into about an hour. First you feel a little tingle. "Hey," you think, "it's like someone added bargain bin gin to my Kool-Aid. Outstanding." Then everything kind of kicks in at once and it's like you're thinking clearly for the first time in your life. This is the best (only?) rave you've ever been to and it's inside your head. "Why," you ask yourself, "do I ever NOT drink Sparks Plus?" Then things start to get a little out of control. Your stomach starts to curl up and you can feel little balls of flavored drink mix clogging up the blood vessels in your brain. A headache comes out of fucking nowhere and your blood sugar level plummets. This is when you should have stuffed a cookie in your mouth and tried to keep dancing, but you lose momentum and wake up an hour and a half later sprawled out on the floor with your cat licking your eyelids. Thanks, Sparks Plus, for a wild afternoon.

Death-Blogging the Ephemeral

2006-06-14T18:59:00.000-07:00

Ok, so now all of your just-trying-to-make-it-in-NYC dreams and barely-scraping-by-but-yes-its-romantic dreams collide violently and explosively, and smoldering like that Troll that Willow zapped in Willow, and, just when you turn your back from the smoking meat heap that was your workaday-but-gosh-I'm-gonna-make-it-someday tableau emerges the THING I FUCKING WORK WITH RIGHT NOW.

It's four-headed, four-bodied, it loooooooves comedy (esp. hearting Joe Rogan and motherfucking Lloyd Bridges [his later work, natch]), it talks to itself incessantly and it is the only thing in the room with me besides computers and your mp3 player. It has red hair, brown hair, a goatee, chops, a giggle and a chortle and something like a chiggle, and it is desperate to reenact scenes from Hot Shots, Part Deaux for me. Between being flattered and trying to stab it to death with my mind, I deal with the fact that I am now being underpaid to work for probably one of the more monstrous of Big Fucking American Corporations, so I have the sweat of America's sub-poverty night-shifters on my conscience. Not that I'm complaining - I could have walked away from the job. I didn't, so goodnight punk rockers, one more white wine spritzer and I'll be hell in the morning. I could miscode very important data!!!!!!!!!!!!!

But really, you know more psychical violence has been justified with Shakespeare's "All the world's a stage" than real violence has been with Nietzsche's quaint little chestnut:

"A declaration of war on the masses by Higher Men is needed!...Everything that makes soft and effeminate, that serves the end of the People or the Feminine, works in favor of Universal Suffrage, i.e. the domination of the Inferior Men. But we should take reprisal and bring this whole affair to light and the bar of judgment."

Seriously, all the world is not literally a stage. That shit is an extended metaphor (and, incidentally, a rewriting of the Riddle of the Sphinx). Accordingly, not everybody actually wants to see a performance at all times. So when you, my four-headed friend, go around like a fucking TiVo stuck on the Spike channel, or "just can't stop" quoting Seinfeld (inaccurately, I might add), I'm not inclined to applaud, or laugh. All I can do is sit and wonder, awestruck by the sprawl.

We Fingertip Our Tarantella

2006-06-08T20:44:00.000-07:00

No, it's not the actual work itself that will kill you - it's the people. Temping is like playing a part in an open-ended run of No Exit, where you become committed, by necessity, to your part because it may never end. Art / Life being equal (even in terms of sheer man hours - I worked 12 of them yesterday) it makes no difference if the character is walking down to the corner buying a pack of smokes, or if the man is himself onstage in front of some other audience that starts to feel like everyday tinitus - always present, alien but internal, ringing humming buzzing. But of course, when you start to notice it (the tinitus or the people) it becomes strange, multi-layered - the buzzing isn't just a pure sine wave - overtones ring out and curve to fit the shape of the room. Same with temping with other people essentially - their Temp Sounds just kind of pop out. No conversation for hours, then suddenly heartbreaking talk of career number three and a caesura between long term, monogamous relationships, and age slowly creeping beyond the point of marketability, and a less-than-adequate grasp on the fine points of Excel - and it's like you've entered the Temporary Unconscious, all archetypes acted out specifically and precisely according to themselves. These people that I temp with (and here it's not like I've got some totalizing knowledge of their lives that they themselves lack - if they could see the conversation as a conversation and not an interested sad-life-story agon, well then they'd come to the same conclusion, or rather be presented with everything in all its bare self-evidence), they have the trashed marriages, and the BA but somehow no prospects, and the bad computer skills, and come overdressed for a job that doesn't really even require a tie, much less a full-on suit. And the whole thing is fairly heartbreaking - a) because it's happening right in front of you (or really in your peripheral vision, because you, like me, cannot bring yourself to take your eyes off the screen and actually watch the conversation happen) and b) because inevitably you must ask, and you are a deficient human being if you don't, "WILL THAT BE ME."

It already is.

Greenpoint

2006-05-29T18:26:00.000-07:00

Arrived in Brooklyn on Friday, after a car ride encompassing 18 hours, a tire blowout in Indiana, getting pulled over in Ohio (not carrying guns), 5 and a half Red Bulls, the Worst Truck Stop Ever, getting pulled over outside of the Queens Midtown Tunnel (not carrying bombs), and heavy rain throughout.

Notable Bodily Sensation: a kind of weightlessness brought on by the green sameness of the landscape, about 3/4 of Pennsylvania. Unerring in its beauty, and also unrelenting - the landscape distorts any sense of time or progress. Pennsylvania is not a state of mind. Without seeing the signs, you somehow know that you are inside of it - the landscape grows hills almost immediately upon exiting Ohio. The beauty is breathtaking until you have no breath left. I suppose then it's suffocating. You get the feeling of being lost, even though there is no way ever to get lost along the I-80, which keeps you clear of pretty much any sign of civilization, except for the literal ones pointing out roads to Harrisburg and a couple Penn State campuses. Eventually you hit the mini-mall of Stroudsberg and it brings on a feeling of almost total exhaustion because you're thinking, "Now? This is the first city I'm hitting? We have more to go ..." But then soon after the Delaware Water Gap, and you're in Jersey, for better or worse. [Also, do NOT stop at the first truck stop after you cross into Jersey on the I-80. Harrowing.]

Road Game to Keep You Occupied: How Many Anglo Modernist Writers Can I Name? (Not nearly as many as I thought.)

Worst Choice for Packed Lunch: Starbucks Sandwiches.

About the Stuff in the Back: "I hear something shifting in the back of the truck." "Ignore it." WHUMP "Ignore it."

And now Greenpoint.

This Patch

2006-05-25T14:58:00.000-07:00

This is it - last post from Chicago. Smell it? Yes, mustardseed and also some hot peppers, and it actually smells like a mustache. If you could be overweight and wear those 70's style tinted glasses all the time, not just in the sun, and, for a guy your size, flail around a lot, then I'd be moving away from you too. For real - nothing personal.

See You Later, Not Goodbye

2006-05-22T10:12:00.000-07:00

We had the going away party on Saturday. Right now I'm living an inflated version of saying goodbye to someone and then exiting the same way at the same time, awkwardly having to laugh and walk out to the parking lot together. Chicago, I said my goodbyes. Now kindly eff off.

Another Superstition

2006-05-18T10:44:00.000-07:00

A footnote in Charles Sanders Peirce's "How to Make Our Ideas Clear":

"Fate means merely that which is sure to come true, and can nohow be avoided. It is a superstition to suppose that a certain sort of events are ever fated, and it is another to suppose that the word fate can never be freed from its superstitious taint. We are all fated to die."

Emptying the Dustbin

2006-05-14T19:20:00.000-07:00

From Greil Marcus's essay on Wim Wenders in The Dustbin of History:

"There is no real need to explicate what Wenders is saying, though one could easily say, along with him, that any film that says the Germans were embarassed, anxious, and scared, even though they didn't have a clue, is a lie - any discourse that means to have it both ways is a lie."

There's something incredibly gratifying about watching Marcus call bullshit on people - this quote concerns an essay Wenders wrote about the German film Hitler: A Biography, which, from what I can glean, Wenders seems to think has some apologist overtones. Marcus spends most of his essay on E.L. Doctrow's Ragtime and Robert Altman's Nashville calling all kinds of bullshit - on Doctrow, on Altman, on pretty much every critic who likes Doctrow and Altman. I like how Marcus can register genuine dislike for, even a form of disgust with, something, and not get bile all over the rug.

Now I've Got the Motherfucking Howling Fantods

2006-05-11T12:52:00.000-07:00

Word to Jessica's hyper-sensitive antennae for picking up on this TV Guide interview with The Office's John Krasinski, who is apparently writing and directing the film adaptation of David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (which was originally made out of paper). I have not enough W's, T's or F's.

I'm nervous - Wallace is one of my favorite writers ever. (But I'm a white, male, college graduate born after 1980, so it's pretty much required). And while Brief Interviews contains some of his least successful work (along with a lot of good stuff), I can't help but feel like somebody is turning my best friend into a lizard. CANNOT become the guy who says, "It's not as good as the book."

There's no way it's going to be as good as the book.

And the guy from The Office? Really?

Accenting Some Other Thing

2006-05-08T20:14:00.000-07:00

I try to keep in touch with a relatively small cadre of old, close friends. In the course of conversations, I almost always find myself impressed with them, or, at the risk of sounding weirdly paternalistic, proud of them. Mostly I think it’s because I have a compulsory question that I ask of them, and without fail they manage to answer it in a way that makes me happy: “Cool. But what else are you doing?”

I say “compulsory” because I think I mean I feel compelled, and maybe the word “compulsive” gets closer to overtone I’m trying to express here. The thing you do is what pays your rent and puts food in your mouth, but the “what else” is the thing that’s interesting, that’s supposedly expressive of some striving tendency in a person to do something that puts aside he practicalities of keeping your body alive, or sometimes even works against that tendency. I think I find myself compelled to ask the “what else” question because the “what else” is the really hard thing to do. And at the same time it’s the most necessary thing, because, paradoxically it lives and breathes outside of the space of necessity, and (at least for people in my tax bracket) sometimes directly opposed to necessity.

Whenever a friend tells me they’re starting a band, or blowing all of their savings on a really long trip on another continent, or acting in a new play, I can’t help but question my own “what else” – and as of right now, there’s not much of a what else at all. Maybe that’s because of a certain tendency I have that I’m just starting to recognize. It’s scary and it has something to do with my wanting to go back to grad school, and going through the enormous pain in the ass of applying and gaining admission to one (well, two, so kudos to me). Because it seems that I have a big problem formulating the “what else” in terms outside of some vaguely nonsensical concept of, for lack of a better, smarter term, “identity.”

Here’s where we run up against the problem of pragmatism. I’m no Louis Menand, but I’ve understand pragmatism as the basic idea that what we do constitutes the whole of what we are, and that notions of belief, self, etc. are all equal to the sum of the action we take – sort of like the existentialist credo, “existence precedes essence,” but somehow less abstract. To point out a really obvious example, you can’t be a writer without actually writing something. Fair enough. But if the idea that action wholly constitutes self holds any water for you, and you, perhaps like me, find yourself hard up when it comes to motivation, you are, by definition, in a pretty serious crisis. My solution was to go back to school.

That’s not the only reason obviously – I do feel like studying literature, theory, philosophy, etc. is pretty much what I do best (not that I know all that much about those things), and I find it fulfilling and exciting … still. It’s hard to come to terms with the fact, though, that I work best within the academic structure. On the one hand, it’s good because I’ve put myself in a position where I have to work. On the other hand, it’s scary because, well, what the fuck does it mean that I need an immense and regimented system to actually make me do something? What is the status of my “what else” if I need all of academia pushing me into productivity? This is why I say I’m compulsive about asking “what else,” because I need to know that it’s possible, and it’s sort of gratifying seeing other people doing it, even if I, myself, sometimes feel stuck at the lab – if that makes any sense.

Saying "Dylar Addiction" Causes "Dylar Addiction"

2006-05-04T10:52:00.000-07:00

On Saturday, I'm going to a performance of Don DeLillo's new play Love-Lies-Bleeding at Steppenwolf. I'm pretty excited about this, as reading White Noise and then Underworld were pretty formative experiences for 18-year-old me (props to the The Sugar Shack). I read Mao II when I was 16, but I don't think I appreciated it (partly because I don't think I knew who Mao was, and I kept waiting for him, Godot-like, to show up - okay, that was embarassing, but I feel cleaner now). Delillo's ability to measure the dizzying effects of American history and culture on the experience of living makes him, implicitly, one of the most profound, living cultural commentators we have. Delillo's fictions show us not how to live, but how we do live, and it's deadly serious and incredibly funny all at once. End of obligatory encomium.

But I'm in sort of a spot. After the performance, Delillo will be in the lobby signing books and answering shallow questions and nodding, embarassed, as sputtering jerks like me try to tell him how totally great his writing is. I've always had an aversion to talking to famous people, or even people who aren't famous, but who's work I really like. When I wrote for my college newspaper, interviews were certainly my weakest point. I could ask interesting questions, but honestly, I found that I had nothing in common with most of the people I talked to, and couldn't engage with them in any non-journalistic fashion. The only exception to this is maybe Angus Andrew of the Liars, but dude is so easy-going and friendly that it's pretty hard not to get along with him. Out-and-out trainwrecks include Fiery Furnace Matthew Friedberger and Moving Unit Blake Miller (in my defense, Friedberger was my first interview ever, while Blake Miller was [is?] a pretentious dick and his band is awful). Every other interview / social situation with a band or actor whose music or acting I like ends up being sort of awkward and uncomfortable.

Which brings me to this spot I'm in. Do I get Delillo's autograph? Do I try to tell him he's awesome? There's something that's so incredibly embarassing about asking for an autograph, which is why I find it so strange that people want to do it. There will be nothing more strange than watching Delillo sign a copy of Underworld, thus allowing that person to fetishize a novel that is, at least in part, about the fetishizing of history (Nick Shay's baseball). It's not the gleeful fetishizing that weirds me out, though - it's the willful, public supplication that people perform. The book signing has all of the hallmarks of kneeling before a king, or kissing the pope's ring. You stand as the author sits, and you lean in to give him to book as he looks at you and asks you who you would like the book signed to. Perhaps he asks you some trivial detail about your life, and he makes you feel special because now, just as you walk out of the signing with signpost of his presence, he also leaves with a tiny piece of you. But that gesture towards exchange, rather than bestowal, actually amplifies the fetishization of the signature. Because now you're not just fetishizing an object (a book signed by Delillo), you're fetishing an historical event - memory and imagined understanding palpably ingrained in a few unreadable ink swoops. Part of you has been colonized by the memory written into this thing, and part of your consciousness becomes synonymous with the object.

But what's so vexing is that I know it's absurd and sort of creepy that people give in to the ritual of the thing, want to, need to fetishize the books as a substitute for the author. I know it's creepy and absurd, but I still find myself scanning my bookshelves for the right one. Should I have him sign the same copy of Underworld that I first read, the one I sat up feverishly underlining, scribbling in the margins? That would be enacting some kind of weird meta-nostalgia, as if Delillo were actually signing my reading experience - maybe that's a bit too intimate. Should I have him sign the copy of White Noise that I stole after I lost my original copy? It would take some of the visceral punch out of the thing, that's for sure. Or maybe I should have him sign a book of his that I've yet to read - Ratner's Star, maybe. I have a copy already. It could be a prefab fetish, all ready to cordon of a part of me, or anyone, really. I could sell them in supermarkets.

Conflicted, to say the least. It seems that it's all or nothing - either give in to the reverential ecstasy, the ritual of the thing, or else don't. I probably won't do it. Seeing celebrities (or whatever Delillo is) when they can't see you is more satisfying somehow. You get to flip the power dynamic - these people who enter you through your eyes and ears, show up in your home, stare at your from the back page of strangers' newspapers and bookspines, pop into your thoughts when you don't expect them - you watch them move and talk and be nervous and say dumb things and you do it without capitulating to a commodity, or by placing a bit of yourself in some other thing. You take a little bit of celebrity's overwhelming power by taking away its body, and that, ephemeral as it may be, is more valuable than a signature.

--------------

Postscript: That being said, if anybody else would like a book signed by Don Delillo, I would be rabidly, excruciatingly pleased to have one signed for you.

Adding Colbert to the Fire

2006-05-03T08:45:00.000-07:00

White House correspondents correspond - they also dine and do so at dinners.

Stephen Colbert is something I've decided to call a "value" comedian. That is, his main appeal is that he is a proponent of a view point and has found some novel way to express that viewpoint. His gift is not in adding anything new to any kind of debate, but in his ability to fold two aspects of something together in order to delineate an ironic kill zone. We like him because he says stuff we like to hear (or, as the case may be, says stuff we don't like to hear in a way we like to hear it). In today's NY Times story about Colbert's "address" (perhaps a bit of a misnomer) to the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner, reporter Jacques Steinberg calls John Stewart Colbert's "comedy patron," which also seems to me a strange misuse - Colbert is a beneficiary of Stewart's benevolent largesse, yeah, but moreso he comes off as Stewart's protege. Colbert's blustery, ironized rhetoric is the inverse of Stewart's fake unprofessionalism. Stewart is endearing while Colbert is kind of grotesque. One of Stewart's hugely powerful techniques is constantly reassuring the audience and his guests that he is no way a professional, that he is totally inept. In fact, if Stewart actually was any of those things, he would look a lot like Colbert's character. Stewart's repudiations of professionalism are in fact the marks of his professionalism, which makes him interesting. Colbert on the other hand, while probably wittier, more incisively satirical than Stewart, constantly looks constrained by his character, and breaks out at times to remind us, "Hey, it's me, Stephen! I'm not really a conservative blowhard!"

Which is why I can kind of sympathize with all of the non-laughers at the WHCA Dinner. Read over the transcript and see how many lines Colbert either adapts or repeats verbatim from The Colbert Report. The concept of "truthiness" - the idea that truth is based on gut feelings rather than facts - has gone from an awesome bit on the show to the entire axis on which the The Colbert Report spins. Granted, it was a really good idea, but Colbert's constant references to it come off kind of clunky. It's the secret decoder ring to his entire show, but as an idee fixe, it doesn't seem quite rich enough to sustain the program for much longer. Those at the dinner who might have been prone to laugh already have laughed, and those who were not prone to laugh didn't. Which isn't to say it wasn't funny, it's just funny in the way Colbert is funny all of the time - and also nobody likes being lambasted right to their face.

I'm sure part of the silence had to come from the fact that this was a fake journalist delivering a pretty scathing endictment to a bunch of real journalists. And that there was none of the good-natured poking-fun-at-self that tends to defuse satire-gone-tense. This, of course, is where Stewart shines brightest - even though Stewart is pretty transparently liberal, he's not partisan, and he's certainly never above directing his jabs at himself. In his address, Colbert's targets were a) Republicans and/or B) Journalists. Lord help you if you're both, and Colbert's implicit claim is that, if you're a journalist, you are. This what makes the speech so brazen: Colbert condemns a handful of communities of which he is not a part, and then engages in no self-criticism at all, or even criticism of Democrats. Hence the bad reception: comedy only goes over when the comedian can align himself with his audience, and that certainly didn't happen. Stewart's Crossfire salvo was intended as a an act of self-policing - trying to get the (shudder) Newstainment people (of which he is one) at least to acknowledge their role in the discursive mess that is public political discussion. Colbert, neither journalist nor Republican, expected people to laugh with him at themselves, while he laughed at, not with (to be fair, his bit about Scalia went over like gangbusters with the man himself).

So maybe it's brave to make fun of the president while he's twenty feet away from you - the gesture is appreciated, for sure - it may be a bit much to expect him to laugh, too.

David Lee Rothing the Dickens Out of It

2006-05-02T11:47:00.000-07:00

We walk down to the beach, David Lee Roth and I. From the top of a dune, he springs, shooting up, body in flying-V formation as dust rings from the future puff out from under him. He lands a mile off shore and steam rises from the sea, as if the sun itself were drowning. Razor blades rain from the sky, and I know now that David Lee Roth has begun that ephermeral something's endless solo career.

Carcharodontics

2006-04-24T08:46:00.000-07:00

At times like this I wonder how much I lose by considering myself somewhere in between residential stasis and vagabond transience and newly-arrived-freshly-openedness. Somewhere in the interstices between those three nodes, or circulating between them at all times, or simply occupying all three spaces at once. Am I trianglular - wholly a trinity - or an impulse bounced from receptor to receptor? Constant motion is a kind of stasis, I guess. Sharks, swimming, drowning, etc.

Also, my Lazy Sundays have gotten downright Torpid. I'd never make it as a shark.

Rumplemintz Holiday Massacre

2006-04-21T09:29:00.000-07:00

Well Liquor drunk isn’t the same as Top Shelf drunk – tell you something you don’t know, you say. It’s not the stomach churning, why oh why did silver tequila from a plastic jug seem like the right way to save up for my new Huffy? abscess-potion qualities that I’m exactly talking about here, though said qualities of Well Liquor are hereby noted and unpleasantly sense-remembered.

Rather it’s the nasty turn that happens oh maybe after Well Liquor beverage number four that’s troubling. Here we’re talking about a sort of perceptual shift, the vertical knob maybe nudged too far, the bar, the world stretched squat and fatty. Imaginary errata snows down but never settles, and your thoughts take some kind of perverse turn – the reptile brain moves a little bit closer to the surface and you can feel it there like a half-dead gila monster pushing its way through layers and layers of gray cheese, snapping pathways and cutting off impulses as it tries to slither its way to the backs of your eyes and flick its tongue out of your mouth. This is what happens at high altitudes or great depths. Imagine maybe this is what happens in the instant before Hillbilly Hollywood murders.

Everything is Accelerated

2006-04-20T12:39:00.000-07:00

A cruel thing I like to do is leave Myspace friend requestors waiting in limbo for weeks like I'm taking a long time to mull things over and make my decision, when really I'm not thinking about it at all!

Thing that is happening: I am moving to New York in order to become a fashion accessory for a Lower East Side cupcake shop promoter (don't ask). He will wrap me around his neck like a mink stole, or a pet snake - he's also requested I make "some kind of animal noise, Nancy." This move will occur sooner than was expected. Memorial Day Weekend, I make Chicago a memory.

Sketch of a House

2006-04-17T17:15:00.000-07:00

It’s a house, but only because people live in it. Two crooked stairs lead up to a porch – three folding chairs (two folded, one un-) lean to the right, while the floorboards of the left side of the porch are broken and buckled inward, like a great foot had slammed down from the sky and dented the once-fine carpentry. The screen door flaps perpetually, though, weirdly, there isn’t any wind – the misshapen house is somehow aware of any pertinent structural damages that might clue the visitor to the manifold repugnances that once took place between its crooked walls. Mildew creeps from caulking around the sills, etcetera. One window is covered over in a blackened sheet of scrap metal.

It’s a house, but only because people live in it. From a distance of one hundred yards, the precise number of bushes foresting the cement walkway remains indeterminate. Each bare branch interferes with the next and it’s all a complicated wash of overlapping and bifurcating tendrils, such that no one can say for sure that each bush is, say, ontologically distinct. Or alive, either. Upon approaching, the bush-wash breaks down into distinct bushes, but the walkway breaks up – cracks riddle the cement slabs, each of them seemingly pried from the earth and dropped back carelessly, each now slightly maligned from the others., and so the house winks, another sign as to its cognizance of its owners’ many past degradations.

Snarking

2006-04-14T09:50:00.000-07:00

This is sorta old news, but I couldn't help but laugh when I saw this Spin.com article about artist Daniel Edwards's sculpture of a naked Britney Spears giving birth to her son. Edwards claims the sculpture is a pro-life statement meant to help encourage those struggling to make "the right choice." Yes, if you're trying to convince anybody who happens to become pregnant not to abort, no matter how incompetent a parent they are, there's no better spokesmodel than Britney Spears.

Your honor, if getting down is a crime, then lock me up and throw away the key!

2006-04-13T07:53:00.000-07:00

It's been a while. Okay, busy month. Here are the talking points:

1. Spent a weekend in the studio and came out with three songs, one of which I'm happy with, two of which aren't mine. The spin? Bumbling neophyte throws slapdash song together out of spare parts, jams shards of My Bloody Valentine's Loveless beneath strings and screams really loud through vinyl and into pickups. One pint of whiskey later, pure fuzzed-out screamy Frankenstein demolishes studio. Frank takes nap and dreams about unsewing his own limbs until only a pile of skin, catgut, and Frankengut remains. Dreamful illogicity bypasses the practical difficulties of self-dissasembly (i.e. the ol' "When crucifying yourself, how do you pound the last nail into your own wrist?" problem - not as abstract as Russell's Paradox, but just as vexing). Frank's liberated consciousness drifts ever-upwards, until PB Shelley traps it like a firefly in a jar. It dies of neglect.

2. My good friend Nick visited from San Jose. It was fun, but also made me nostalgic, which is a feeling I hate. It's not your fault, Nick. Not your fault that my golden days are gone. Not ... your ... fault ... Oh God ... (Also, some guy in a bar asked Nick a question about me, referring to me as "[Nick's] Little Bald Friend," which, for an instant, made me see myself as a forest-dwelling dwarf. Like a psychotic David the Gnome.)

3. Last weekend I went to New York to visit Jessica and CUNY and the New School. Fun as always. Bobbed my head and did the Charleston at Hip-Hop Karaoke. Ate a cupcake. My favorite incident at the Whitney Biennial occurred after a screening of Francesco Vezzoli's "Trailer for a Remake of Gore Vidal's Caligula," which is, as you might guess, a trailer for a movie that doesn't exist. It's very tongue-in-cheek and very funny. While Jessica and I were leaving the screening room, some guy who had also just seen the film told a friend, "Don't bother. It's just a preview of Gore Vidal's Caligula," and without a hint of irony. So great.

4. Accepted admission at CUNY. In a continual gesture whose ramifications I don't want to contemplate, I habitually mispell CUNY as CUNT in IM conversations and emails.

5. It's my birthday this weekend. Up yours, 22!

Look out Academia!!! I point skyward!!!!

2006-03-20T19:41:00.000-08:00

Has anybody written a book called Disco(urse) Fever! yet?

... And Again

2006-03-16T18:25:00.000-08:00

Dear Hannah,

Today Mark was admitted to the New School for Social Research's MA program for philosophy. I'm gassy.

All My Love,

Marty

The Post About The Tristram Shandy Movie

2006-03-15T17:15:00.000-08:00

I saw Tristram Shandy over the weekend. All in all, it was kind of what I expected - 24 Hour Party People in the 18th Century. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing - Michael Winterbottom's metacinema is nothing if not entertaining. But this sort of metacinema is damned from the get-go to be "just" entertaining. Which, again, seems more like a diffusing strategy than anything else. While Winterbottom's directorial temprament - playful, involuted, bawdy - is well suited to Sterne's novel, it can't ever be as much of a headfuck as that novel, if only for the fact that without Tristram Shandy the book, Winterbottom's aesthetic and formal merry-go-round wouldn't look quite like it does.

(For anybody who's unfamiliar, Tristram Shandy is like metafiction before metafiction, or, as Steve Coogan puts it in the movie, "Postmodern before there was any modern to be post about." Part of this is owing to the fact that at the time Sterne's work was originally serialized, the novel as a form hadn't been codified yet - people didn't know what novels were "supposed to look like," exactly. The effect of this is that Tristram Shandy is probably more shocking now than it was then, as we've had two and a half centuries worth of average, formulaic stuff drilled into us, such that when we see a novel with blank pages, alternating pages of English and Latin, idiosyncratic punctuation, completely fractured narration, and a self-conscious narrator who goes well beyond the standard conventions of simply addressing the reader as such, we feel a little weird about what we think we know about artistic "progress").

So basically the film does the ol' postmodern two-step: first we're introduced to an exterior of Shandy Hall, and we see Tristram walking down a path, addressing the audience as he is prone to do. We're watching an adaptation of Tristram Shandy, a film made from the book. But then, eventually, whoa shit, we start to see what's going on behind the scenes of the very film we're watching! The third step in the two step is, of course, we're shown that step one is actually just an extension of step two. The dramatization of the novel is used pretty much to set the stage for the behind the scenes action - the nitty gritty of getting the film produced and the great comic dialogue between Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon (playing Walter Shandy / Tristram Shandy and Toby Shandy [respectively], and themselves).

The thing that makes all of this work is the lack of ambition, oddly. Undertaking the project of adapting Tristram Shandy is, in itself, incredibly ambitious. And so it seems a fitting and necessary 'fuck you' to spend most of the film following Steve Coogan obsessing over his insecurities, or the director's grappling with the producers. Much of it is very good satire - almost none of it is Sterne. It's almost as if Winterbottom was like, "Oh, Tristram Shandy's all meta, right? Well, we'll just be meta. I think I read the novel in college. I remember enough." And of course there is a running joke wherein Steve Coogan has to cover for not having read the novel - I hope I was better than that as an undergrad.

In the midst of all of this, Winterbottom inserts, I suspect a little guiltily, the faint trace of a love triangle. It's pretty well useless, except to add a bit of depth to Coogan, whose primary charm rests in his ability to seem like he's a bad actor without actually being one. Films structured like Tristram Shandy sometimes catch flack for being "indulgent" or something. Of course, we don't get off that easy, because in the film the filmmakers discuss adding in the Widow Wadman / Toby Shandy love story to beef up the film. Oh, the confluences. This is pretty much the structure of the commercial metafilm: always apologizing for its own form by capitulating to the standard narrative conceits of mainstream cinema, even while the form undercuts those conceits by pointing out that they're often added for less-than-artistic purposes. The real love story, though, is between everybody in the film and Tristram Shandy the novel. During the course of the film everybody professes their love for the book, how dedicated they are to the project they are due to the special place the novel holds for them. It's only in these moments that we see Coogan's true depth, as he's the only one who hasn't read it. His own vanity, his self-reflective insularity, prevents him from picking it up, and in his inability to do anything but quote as the film quotes (that is, in some sense, inauthentically) we can only pity him.

My Jams

2006-03-11T07:18:00.000-08:00

I've got a guest post up at Printculture. If anybody's been wondering how my workshop at 826 Chicago turned out, go read about it in all its majesty.

I'm going to see Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story later today. Being that Tristram Shandy is one of my favorite books, I'm interested to see what director Michael Winterbottom will do. More later, m'nerds.

Hypocrite Lecter

2006-02-28T11:29:00.000-08:00

I was listening to the new Belle & Sebastian the other day. The song "Dress Up In You" features the line, “If I could have a second skin / I’d probably dress myself in you.” Which sounds kinda sweet, until you think of The Silence of the Lambs.

"It puts the lotion on its skin or it gets the hose."

Today was a good day ...

2006-02-24T16:59:00.000-08:00

I got into CUNY's English Ph.D. Program, motherfuckers.

Beavis v. Derrida?

2006-02-23T12:47:00.000-08:00

"People I can trick 'em into thinking anything"

2006-02-15T18:12:00.000-08:00

This is part of a series of fragmented, loosely connected thoughts, mostly without answer, mostly amateur, mostly concerning the connection between rhetoric and fiction. (By “rhetoric,” I mean the simple definition of rhetoric: basically, using language to convince people of stuff, which, is something that’s incredibly abstruse almost by virtue of how simple some of it looks. Don’t take my word for it – some Greek guys said some stuff about saying stuff. [I’m also going to make an effort not to talk about Paul de Man here, as that will probably undermine (by definition) anything useful I have to say. This isn’t about an “argument” – although that is to say that what I’m writing is not “rhetorical,” and who could fail to see the rhetoric behind that claim? Certainly not Paul de Man.]).

First of all, there’s the question of why the question is necessary. After all, isn’t fiction all about not having to convince anybody of anything? Don’t we simply take for granted that books with “Fiction” printed in the lower left-hand corners of their back covers have an implicitly special relationship to argumentation? Wait, is it even possible for a book of fiction to have an argument?

Works of fiction make arguments all the time. That is, they generate arguments through their characters, through their narrators, etc. Robert Coover’s Richard M. Nixon in The Public Burning (which I hope I’ll be able to write more about) is virtually defined by the arguments he makes for his own political decisions, for Cold War politics in general, for certain gustatory predilections, and what have you. This is not news. But this is a character making a set of specific arguments that, I would argue, are also (and more importantly) descriptive statements. (Needless to say, I don’t have the book in front of me right now, and you’ll have to at least skim the Nixon chapters to see what I’m saying in regards to The Public Burning, but I feel like the “first-person statements are also always self-descriptive” thing will probably hold for a lot of other books. Let’s also note, while we’re here, that, if it true that first-person statements [in fiction] are also always self-descriptive, then that act of description is also performative [within the frame of the novel] since the character is [again, within the frame of the novel] a self-construction made of the very language he utters. Which is weird, because that sort of kicks the backslash out of J.L. Austin’s constative / performative distinction, collapsing it).

So nobody’s going to disagree that, whatever arguments in works of fiction “do,” characters can make those arguments. Let’s also note that this is categorically a different thing than a book “making an argument.” Which is not to say that the character’s argument cannot play a part in the book’s argument, but the two (most likely) are hardly identical.

I have not read Wayne Booth. But then there’s this.

Sentence(s): Double Legitimation?

2006-02-12T10:01:00.000-08:00

"When we examine the current status of scientific knowledge - at a time when science seems more completely subordinated to the prevailing powers than ever before and, along with the new technologies, is in danger of becoming a major stake in their conflicts - the question of double legitimation, far from receding into the background necessarily comes to the fore. For it appears in its most complete form, that of reversion, revealing that knowledge and power are simply two sides of the same question: who decides what is, and who knows what needs to be decided?" - Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (1979, trans. 1984)

Sentence: Double Anatomy

2006-02-05T11:38:00.000-08:00

"Smelling the chocolate, glancing at the unshapely humps and amputated spines, thorns, of miles of crippled cacti, I only smiled and told myself that the flesh of the cheerleader was still embedded in the flesh of Pixie's mothers and so soothed myself with various new visions of this double anatomy, this schizophrenic flesh." - John Hawkes, Second Skin (1963)

Blood Writing

2006-01-24T19:05:00.000-08:00

I have this thing, and I know a lot of other people have it to, where I never want to buy used books if they have marginalia or underlining from a previous owner. It's fairly common, and I've passed up more than few good books on the cheap simply because I wanted a clean copy. A few times I've broken down, like when I found the Purloined Poe anthology for $10. What is this? Appreciation of the book-as-object? That futile impulse to avoid influence? Maybe.

I've been reading Nietzsche lately (Kaufman's translations from the Viking Portable), and I bought my edition even though it had underlinings because that much Nietzsche for $7 was just too good to refuse. Most of the notes are in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which is included in its entirety, and one of them actually made me think. The first part of "On Reading and Writing" reads,

"Of all that is written I love only what a man has written with his blood. Write with blood, and you will experience that blood is spirit. It is not easily possible to understand the blood of another: I hate reading idlers. Whoever knows the reader will henceforth do nothing for the reader. Another century of readers - and the spirit itself will stink."

Next to that last sentence, someone wrote "they should be writing." I interpret this bit of marginalia as a reading of those sentences, and it seems to me to be a bit off. Zarathustra doesn't exactly seem to be saying people should write (rather than read) more, but that the only writing worth reading is difficult writing. He who writes with blood is worth reading, and the blood of another is difficult to understand, therefore writing that is difficult to understand is worth reading. Hence, for idlers, who "know the reader" and can give the reader what the reader already knows, there is no blood, only an attempt at "clarity" (which word is probably indicative of a betrayal of writing itself, a making-invisible of signifying power) - the writer bypasses himself in order to reach the reader. Writing becomes a communicative act. It's not that far of a leap from Nietzsche's blood-writing to Barthes's writerly text, at least in their effects. Certainly you'd be hard pressed to find the Lord High (Post)Structuralist leaning on the notion of spirit, but there seems to be a sympathy between the two ideas. I'm sure someone has written a dissertation on this or something - and this is mine.

Excise the Excess

2006-01-16T21:02:00.000-08:00

Things Destroyed by Last Saturday's House Party:

1. One case of Charles Shaw cabernet-sauvignon (2004 - a fine vintage, especially at $3 a pop)

2. The impeccable whiteness of my comforter (see above)

3. My patience for the tall, bespectacled dude who kept yelling "Cam'Ron! Fucking Cam'Ron!" and slapping the living room ceiling.

4. My desire to imbibe any alcohol for the next two weeks.

5. My manners (from what I'm told).

Sadly, Not Feeling the Noize, Or Perhaps Too Much, At Least in the Literal Sense

2006-01-05T11:10:00.000-08:00

This is probably the most awesome thing I've stumbled across today. I still don't know if M.A.N. (Mothers Against Noise) is real or not; the Reefer Madnessness of it all makes me think "no," as does this thread from a Lightning Bolt message board (the Jan. 4 post by xdugef seems fairly compelling evidence of hucksterism, but raises more intriguing questions like, "Island Records? WTF?"). What skews everything is this article from Detroit's Metro Times, dated well over a year ago, that gives M.A.N. a mention at the end.

A quick scan of five or six message boards shows that most people seem to think it's a hoax, and a pretty good one. I'm still not sure. The overarching craziness is only really missing one attribute of the internet nutjob, that being sporadic capitalization of words. A typical example might look like this:

"Joe McWrites-A-Lot writes nothing but LEFT-WING LIES meant to INTIMIDATE readers into believing the FASCISTS in the DEMOCRATIC PARTY!!!! Who is, even now, conducting BRAINWASHING experiments by dousing copies of the JEW YORK TIMES in a specially developed MIND CONTROL FORMULA, to be delivered even to the few PATRIOTS who brave the FILTH-STREWN LIES of its pages!!!!

And so on. Anybody who has ever been editor of any publication with even a hint of liberal sympathy (or even writing about the existence of liberal anythings) has received an email written like this, and it's always a freaky delight. These dispatches usually read a bit like Billy Graham doing his best Jim Jones, or like Ezra Pound doing his best Ezra Pound.

Really the thing that M.A.N. has going for itself, comedy-wise, hoax or not, is the What is Noise Music section of the site. It's almost quaintly out of touch with any kind of normative standard of what parses "noise" from "music," (and by noise I mean things like buzz saws and traffic [though of course plenty of music has been written utilizing things of that nature - Cage, Antheil, Varese, etc.]).

What's also interesting (and this is only true if the site isn't a hoax) is that the author of the "What is Noise Music" section spins out a theory of behavior and psychology based on noise, and also manages to counter-narrate the development of 20th Century music, but never seems to give an example of what music actually is other than "not Noise." All of this seems too crazy and non-persuasive to be real, but, jeez, I really hope it is. Wolf Eyes is one step from MTV.

"Bitch" Fight

2006-01-03T12:17:00.000-08:00

Poking around on the internet this time of year (like specifically this time of year, i.e. post-holiday) always makes me breathe a bit easier, free as we now are of the various knots, loops, and information clots that are year-end lists. Why the list is the favored rhetorical device of the holidays, I can only venture to guess. Maybe some displacement of that Santa Claus fantasy we all harbor deep down (you know the one I'm talking about).

And everybody bitches about other people's lists, because everybody's own special list is just a little bit more special then that other guy's list who the first guy is bitching about, regardless of how interchangeable they all seem after you read about 20 of them. So maybe it shouldn't be that much of a surprise that Village Voicer Status Ain't Hood offered up this riposte to the Stereogum bitch-session about Pitchfork's year-end lists. The spleen-venting surrounding any mention of Pitchfork is business as usual, but the unusual amount of racial hand-slapping maybe signifies some kind of newly (re)upped-ante. People (either white or black) getting pissed about white people writing about black music is as old as, well, white people writing about black music, true, but the old argument is, "We (black musicians) don't need your white paternalism and condescension to 'explain' our music, thank you very much. And how would you know, anyway?" This new argument, at least in its Status / Stereogum articulation, seems to take one meta leap over and out of that frame, and somehow reconfigure itself as, "We (white critics) don't need you racist, white commentators to tell us how not to, or where not to write about black music."

The comments on Status address the problem more directly (and with a more racially diverse cross-section of respondents, I would guess), though most of it is just saying, "Rappers shouldn't be praised (or written about) because they (mostly Cam'Ron and Young Jeezy and the Clipse) say bad (i.e. misogynist, socially irresponsible) things," or "Rap should be praised, in spite of all those things, for its vital, creative use of language, and an ear for the rhythm of a line that is as sensitive as any poetry," but frankly nobody is really treating the problem seriously, I don't think. This is the old form vs. content argument par excellence, and it seems to me that without looking at the complex interactions between "form" and "content" (and, to head off criticism that I imagine would come my way, were anybody who cared about this problem reading right now, this can be done in a space outside the rip-tides and ice floes of academic prose), or in fact looking at them as valences of the same thing, it's going to be hard for anybody to do anything that is going to convice anybody of anything, as far as the ethics of a certain artform are concerned.

Let's also keep in mind that this is a familiar but weird debate about ethics. Familiar because, at its base, the argument about whether or not art that is both very good and profoundly disturbing / ethically questionable should be considered "valid" or "good" (or whatever) has been played out hundreds of times, from Bosch to Mailer. Weird because it essentially asks us how uncomfortable we will let art make us feel before we can no longer take it, or at least sanction it. Note the debate is never, "Should rappers be talking about bitches, bling, and blow?" but always, "How can you listen to rappers talking about that stuff and call it art?" In other words, censure rather than censor.

Obviously whether or not any of this bothers you, whether you can listen to Cam'Ron rap about rape on SDE, or the Clipse and Young Jeezy rap about dealing coke, depends on how you feel about the way all of this (admittedly reprehensible shit) references the real. That is, is it all just talk? Or does it matter once it hits the public, because any fib in service of a verse might as well be true, or a lie, so long as it sounds right? If the rhyme's autobiographical does that make it more wrong than a fictional rhyme, because the rhyme's origin is in a real crime? Are these the right waters in which to float your critical boat in this debate?

Theories of reference and signification don't really do much for a debate like this (or they get everything sort of muddled, like this unfortunate invocation of something called "free interplay" which Jacques Derrida supposedly made up [though it's more likely that Derrida borrowed a concept called "freeplay" from Claude Levi-Strauss (see "Structure, Sign, and Play" in every anthology ever)] [and plus I've got a whole 'nother thing to say about that Derrida / Dipset blog post]), or at least not if you invoke them explicitly. I'll stop short of saying the solution is something like a practical criticism informed by theory, accessible but not dumbed down. I'll stop short because it sounds a bit condescending, and a bit like some middle-class white guy trying to "explain" a music who relationship to reference he can only ever guess at, and whose proximity to said relationship is way, way too far gone. That's what I really believe, but I do think that such a belief is tempered by years of learning to think a certain way about culture and language, and in order for me to believe that I could have the right answer, I would first and foremost have to assert that I was right. That's something I can't do.

(Re)Assessment

2005-12-29T11:14:00.000-08:00

Something I've noticed about my own blogging (that is, the actual act of blogging, not the accumulation of entries and paratextual effluvia that could be [is?] metaphorized and nounified by the word "blogging"), is that it's almost completely impulsive. This is to say that the frequency and topic of any given blog entry has a lot to do with a) where I'm located (that is, directly in front of a computer or not), b) usually what I happened to read immediately before I begin writing, and c) a certain level of either circumstantial (rather than existential [or perhaps micro-existential (which kind of collapses circumstantial and existential, I guess)]) boredom (I'm writing from work right now) or frenzied desperation re: my own feelings towards my learning curve as a writer.

The impulsiveness of my blogging, of course, works as an antidote to the first part or Item C (the boredom part), and probably, I'm guessing, a hindrance to the second part. It's hard to think about (that is, to write about, which is a form of thinking about, maybe the only form of thinking about we can talk about [unless we get into boring cognitive sciences lab rat work, which is actually talking about rats] - i.e. the way that, when philosophers [I'm thinking (writing) of Heidegger here] write about other philosophers' "thought," what they really mean is writing) structure, lexical coherence, and all of the other things that make good writing good, when you're doing it by the seat of your (my) pants.

Sometimes I think long and hard about blog entries I'd like to write. For instance, I've got about 1,500 words about Robert Coover (which is projected to extend to about five times that length, and include Henry Darger and outsider art) sitting on my computer, but I can't really bring myself to finish it. Likewise something about Wolf Parade's Apologies to the Queen Mary (and how awesome it is) lingers in my Blogger Dashboard, but the time for that has come and gone.

And so what results is a kind of mess of abstraction that lacks a certain concrete topicality, that has little external reference. I've lost my connection to thingness, I suppose, and found a sort of dumbed-down fractal abstraction in place of that solid grounding. And for all of my willingness to buy into (and the pleasure I take in) ideas and theories about the relationship of writing to reference, of signification, blah, blah, blah, I still find myself feeling more than a little guilty, more than a little solipsistic. Note how I don't seem to care that my use of parentheses makes my writing kind of unreadable at times (and the fact that, to me, this use of parentheses is an attempt to work against certain temporal facts of the reading experience, and to try to imagine what a manner of reading other than the one in which we're forced to participate might look like). Note how far we've come without a hyperlink.

Needless to say, it's just a matter of deciding to work harder, or at least work differently. While I like the fact that this blog probably isn't that interesting to anybody but me, I dislike the autobiographizing I'm doing, and that my self-critique here is just another way to autobiographize and that, really, as much as I would like to think that this isn't a "personal" blog, really it couldn't be anything else. Certainly this blog is in its adolescence, struggling with a question about identity that it can't quite articulate yet. And let's not even think about what that means for me, the writer.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I sat down to write this entry about David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster, which Little Brown published earlier this month. I began to think about how I want to write about it even though I'm almost exactly only halfway through it. And about how I get that urge a lot when I'm halfway through a book. Maybe next time>

The Corporate Reading Room

2005-12-22T17:45:00.000-08:00

Things I was paid to read this week:

1. Two chapters of Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler

2. 60 pages of The Four Fundamental Concepts of Pyschoanalysis by Jacques Lacan

3. 25 pages of Cartesian Meditations by Edmund Husserl

4. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, in its entirety

5. The Radical LEAP: a Personal Lesson in Extreme Leadership (a corporate leadership book [that quotes Bukowski and Michael Cunningham (for some reason, because who reads those things for their literary validity? [and let's not forget that you are, indeed, utilizing the transitive property of literary validity, Bukowski and Cunningham aren't necessarily your best variables . . .])]) by Steve Farber, in its entirety ( . . . and really the saddest thing is that Farber uses the majority of Bukowski's "Artistic Selfishness," which runs thusly:

what's genius?
I don't know
but I do know that
the difference between a madman and a
professional is
that
a pro does as well as he can within what
he has set out to do
and a madman
does exceptionally well at what
he can't help
doing.

and then has either the balls or the obliviousness to compare himself to the poem's "madman." Yes, Stephen Farber, leadership consultant, once divorced, beachfront San Diego living yuppie, you certainly are a madman.)

6. The Tuesday edition of The Chicago Sun-Times in its entirety

7. The Thursday edition of The New York Times (everything except the Thursday fashion section)

Free to Constrain

2005-12-14T21:37:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I found out that 826 Chicago accepted my workshop proposal, which is really good. Essentially I'll be teaching high schoolers about constrained writing techniques (a couple of which I tried out on this blog). I think this will be my first official teaching experience, so I'm a bit nervous and I have to actually write a syllabus, which shouldn't be too bad, as the workshop only meets three times.

But of course now I'm in a position where, for the first time in my life, I'm directly responsible for teaching a group of people younger than me about something, albeit something rather esoteric and non-functional. I've been thinking a lot about the idea of constraint, and it seems to be one of those things that has a tendency to blur at the edges when you start to examine it. For example, the simplest constraint is to deny yourself the use of one letter (a la Perec's A Void). Easy enough, very constraining (if the letter is common). But the next step is to actually ask what consitutes restraint, or what kind of work constraint does in the field of meaning, or in the telegraphic or communicative aspects thereof.

An easy thing to say if you want to push it is, "Oh, well isn't all writing a kind of constraint on thought? Isn't all language?" and this sounds facile and like the sort of thing that gets people all riled up: "No, asshole, language is the condition of thought." At the same time, though, if we consider constraints, that is deliberate constraints, as a given condition of writing, then the frustration we feel when looking for that word without an e, or whatever, starts to feel a lot like the frustration we feel when we just cannot find the right wording for that clincher sentence when writing without constraint. Which leads me to believe that constraint isn't useful so much as a neat trick (though it is a neat trick), but really as an exercise in exploring the limits that language sets before us by constricting those limits.

This is where the telegraphic aspects of constrained writing comes in, because it seems to me that there is one major bifurcation in constrained method, and then probably a bunch of subsets after the split. One way to do it is to attempt to say what you want to say even in the face of the constraint. This turns constraint into an obstacle rather than a method (obviously I think I know what a method is), and it seems more fruitful as mere exercise. Practicing this kind of writing seems more (auto)pedagogical than experimental in the true sense, and so probably something I'll try asking the kids to do in the workshop.

The other way to go is to let the constraint guide the writing, and this, to me, is the more interesting way to do it. The experience of grammar, of syntax, of the rules of language, basically, becomes so heightened that whatever you end up writing has to sacrifice, perhaps paradoxically, a certain communicativeness in order to communicate more effectively. The negotiations implicit in all writings are pushed so sharply to the fore that whatever it is you intend to do as a writer ends up conflated with the rules of language (which, of course, have been augmented by the constraint, and this is where it becomes apparent that constraint is, in fact, not so much restriction but rerouting).

Needless to say, again, I'm very excited about the whole thing.

>>>>>>!!!!<<<<<<<

2005-12-08T20:46:00.000-08:00

The Bush regime is like that guy who keeps poking you in the forehead and you say, "Hey, stop doing that," and they look at you like, "What? I'm not doing anything," and then keep poking you, and you tell them again, and again they say, "What, dude? What? You're weird. I'm not doing anything." Then they pee on your shoes. And you frown.

Ornette Coleman - "Lonely Woman"

2005-12-05T11:07:00.000-08:00

I hadn't listened to this song in a couple of years, but I downloaded it last night. It's easy to forget the power of Coleman's bands at their best. Though Coleman is almost always the star of the show, this track is unthinkable without Charlie Haden's astounding bass work. While Billy Higgins's drums keep that rock, solid right-hand rhythm intact, Haden's bass adds an air of menace, playing way, way behind the beat, laying in those drone figures and seemingly threatening to derail the driving rhythm of the song. Characteristically, Haden provides the pulse, but it's a pulse out of synch with the general harmolodic verticality of the song. The moments that absolutely kill me are when Higgins gets his toms and snare all tangled up with Haden's bass lines, all while keeping that ride going with his right hand, like he's fighting off that darkness, freeing up Don Cherry and Ornette, allowing them to use the bass as a counter-rhythm to push those mournful lines even further (which bass, come to think of it, actually functions more like a drum than a bass, which makes sense, as Coleman's compositions famously rely far more on melody than on harmony).

Back Like Scraped Plaque - the Dental Hygiene Post

2005-12-01T09:42:00.000-08:00

I'm gearing up to write something longer for something else, and to actually really for trues sit down and get a real job and stop this temping hokum. Cause I keep acing myself out of my gigs, applying Word and Excel shortcuts with blinding speed, formatting documents into textual tableaus worthy of the finest Roman frieze, and taking frequent breaks - so proficient are my temping skills that I finished the job early and fucked myself out of the $200 I would have made today and tomorrow. I am so awesome.

Well, time aplenty.

How I Write When It's 20 Degrees Outside

2005-11-17T11:52:00.000-08:00

Anton Chekhov wrote that the weather is a chastisement from God. You have to wonder just what the fuck Chicago did wrong. Lest we forget the the city's windy not for its you-most-certainly-are-in-KS-strength blustering, but rather for its politicians, that wind metaphorizing its way into the literal and vice versa, the Word and Wrath of God blowing trans-Loop, gerrymandered transit lines and chapped faces frozen alike, the circumstances of production and object themselves spooning away in some frozen chrysalis. Sin and chastisement all, I'd crucify the tablet smashers myself, if only I didn't have to make the 40 minute (rather than year) wander down to city hall. We idolators take the brunt anyways, but it's just not commensurate punishment.

But some other writer said not to ever, ever start with a description of the weather. But also you have to wonder if it can be called weather (that is, if that thing that is outside is the same out there as it is in here) seeping through, as it does, all those bodily thresholds. We're all holes anyways, from orifice to blackhead divits to the asymptotal proximity of electron and nucleus - H20, air, and tiny sparks of electricity, flimsy enough, it would seem, to drift like so much ashy detritus from the burning cherry-tips of fat-cat-chomper thunderheads, dragging until their substance flecks away to us below, and we slip on it and fall on our asses in the middle of a crosswalk. We blow away little by little, suck up our substance by smaller degrees, until dissipation overtakes reification. So the weather wraps your liver up in cold (and let's not forget that cold is a whole lot of nothing-at-all), and you think about that time Jon Anderson offered to rearrange your liver to the solid mental grace. I said thanks but no thanks, and yet he insisted. Jon Anderson, you're not fooling anyone - you don't know how to play tambourine. Now you see me coming from stage-right, about to rage on you! Look scared!

Grizzly Beard

2005-11-15T09:01:00.000-08:00

Chicago is a bearded city. Facial hair carries a lot of currency here, brings a lot of cred with it, and, inevitably, like a new pair of Roos at the top of the monkeybars (or last week at the Empty Bottle, now that I think about it), also brings a lot of mad-dogging and aggressive jealousy and the like.

And my beard has served me well, certainly. But things have gotten a little out of hand. I keep forgetting to buy new batteries for my digital camera, but rest assured, my face situation is approaching critical. So it's almost time to shave. But before that, a shout out to the haters:

1. Dude at the coffee shop with a ratty, patchy excuse for a beard, fuck you. I know you take a long time to refill my coffee not because you're busy frothing up some soy/espresso concoction, but because in your heart of hearts you know your beard will always elicit looks of pity, while mine draws in nothing but awe, like some black hole in my face. And you need some new records - even though I have my cans on when I visit your establishment, in the back of my mind I know one of seven Wilco tracks, one of four Belle & Sebastian tracks, or something from Chutes Too Narrow is playing, and it drives me crazy. You are bland.

2. Girl at the record store who thinks I'm like 40, fuck you. I know about Bloc Party, I just don't care.

3. People who avoid me on the train, you're cool. Thank you, I would like to take your seat.

4. Kyle, my roommate, thank you for shaving your beard, even though it was looking pretty good. We dress similarly most of the time, and I don't need the extra stares that matching beards inevitably draw.

5. Zit under my beard, fuck you. You have taken advantage, and it will not be tolerated.

6. Bob Ross, I miss you.

I am unpacking this sentence. Yes I am.

2005-11-13T10:07:00.000-08:00

I'm coming to the tail end of grad school apps. Only a couple of things to worry about: GRE's and the applications themselves. Strangely, it's the latter, not the former, that worry me. I usually do pretty well on standardized tests, just so long as I'm pretty familiar with the material. Though I should be studying more. But I dread, dread, having to wade through the tedium of filling out applications, having transcripts sent, making the tiny but, from what I'm told, necessary tweaks to my personal statement. Writing 15-page papers? No sweat. Calling back the electric company? Kill me.

Writing is easy by comparison because the task is so immense: it's impossible to ignore. When I'm in "writing" mode, I end up constantly preoccupied with the piece, always thinking about it. In effect, always writing. Things like paying bills, though, comparatively easy thing (as long as you have the money) seem impossible. They have a tendency to recede into the background to the point that they become unnoticeable, and I forget about them.
Whatever I'm writing will turn out pretty well, but all of my bills will be overdue. Gosh, it's all so frustrating.

Trauma

2005-11-08T08:14:00.000-08:00

When I was in the third grade I came in second place in my class' spelling bee because I reversed 'a' and 'e' in "beautiful." Ever since, I've had to double-check whenever I write that word, that double-take gawking at a fresh scar from an old accident.

Appropriate My Ennui!!!!!!

2005-11-03T18:37:00.000-08:00

I thought about writing this totally long post that was monotonous and exhausting, in which I explicitly avoided the themes of monotony and exhaustion, while always hinting towards them, so that by the end of the post you woud look back and be like, "Whoa, dood. At first I though that post was about laundry and verbs, but it turns out it was about monotony and exhaustion. It turns out that by not communicating his feeling of always being exhausted (by a new temp gig) and of feeling like his life is just a series of endlessly deferred obligations (or the "differance of the [n]everyday" for all [two] of you loyal academics and academixtresses [by the way, Academixtress would be a totally good DJ name for a Ph.d. who spins L'il Kim and Morton Subotnick mash-ups, or finds the break beats in Varese's Ionisation (and it's my idea, so fuck right off, all plagiarizing my blog and shit - same goes for that "differance of the [n]everyday" line)]), he has actually succeeded in communicating just such a notion! Pardon me while I wipe down my now-befouled Blackberry!"

But instead I wrote a really long sentence with intentionally confusing punctuation, and "apologized" for not writing in my blog as much due to my having a new temp gig, and being too tired to drag my ass to the internet cafe down the street every night. (But apparently not too tired to drink too many 25-cent beers every Tuesday.)

Anyways, the internet gets installed on Saturday morning while I am at work. ("Work on a Saturday? The hell, you say!" But it's true - Chicago needs fancy reprints of its newspapers, and its yearning does not have a weekend. Therefore, I don't either.) This means: a) No more hauling my brick of a fucking laptop around unless I really want to, and b) Probably some boring blog entries about how I should get rid of the matresses that are propped up against my bedroom wall. Maybe with all of that leisure time to sit and think, I'll even figure out what this blog is about.

In fact, that last thought has given birth, perhaps prematurely, to an idea. EVERYBODY COMMENT ON THIS POST WITH WHAT YOU THINK THIS BLOG IS ABOUT AND/OR WHAT IT SHOULD BE ABOUT!!!!!!

And now, this awesome picture, apparently taken at a bar mitzvah. Or a quinceanera.

Put on Your Pain Face

2005-10-24T09:30:00.000-07:00

Walruses are so stupid. Everybody always talks about how ugly manatees are, but seriously, walruses look even worse. I would hunt them if I could; not for their skin and oil, mind you. Just to make the world a more aesthetically pleasing place. Because when the aliens come, they're not going to speak our language, they're not going to know about our environment. All they're going to see is "pretty" and "not pretty." All the uglies of the planet earth will see is the business end of high powered organic vaporizer.

Drake didn't bother to calculate the chances of finding intelligent, attractive life, either. Luckily, someone else did.

I'll start writing about books and stuff again eventually.

P.S. The guy sitting next to me is complaining to his friend that some other dude doesn't know anything about jazz. Somewhere in Afghanistan, someone is complaining about that guy not knowing about some awesome oud player.

Your Cover Letter Means Fuck All

2005-10-21T12:15:00.000-07:00

You know that cover letter you worked on? You know how you poured ever ounce of your written acumen into those finely-wrought molds, the words themselves molten experience? You know how, when you finally finished that cover letter, you looked over it, rightfully, with a sense of pride that not only had you accomplished those things, but you had managed to articulate your qualifications for the job in such an admirable prose style?

Well it'll probably end up in the trash. I was as disturbed as you are, friend, when, at my position in an HR department in a very large corporation, I was instructed to just tear them off of the resumes and throw them away.

What a waste.

Also, big ups to Jessica and Amy for getting my poverty stricken ass into the sold out New Pornographers show at the Metro last night. As usual, they slayed. But big downs to you, Metro, for charging me $5 for a Miller Light, although your waitstaff is very nice. Ima beat that mid-sized venue up.

I am an American Aquarium Drinker

2005-10-20T11:31:00.000-07:00

Hearing "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart" in a Chicago coffee shop is like hearing:

"Hey, you. Yeah, the yuppie who makes 60K a year, yet can somehow afford to hang out here for hours every afternoon. Isn't Wilco AMAZING?"

Don't get me wrong: I like Yankee Hotel Foxtrot as much as the next guy who likes Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, but it does seem like a bit of a congratulatory pat on the back for aging but usta-be-hip new parents. They look at each other, smile, and nod like "Yeah, babe. We still got it." It's that "challenging" album you can put on without offending anyone.

And, despite what anybody says, A Ghost is Born is subpar in its peaks and stab-worthy in its valleys. Yet great reviews all around because it's Wilco, man, fucking saviors of rock and roll come to save us from everything we need saving from!

Okay.

"If I had a soul-vaporizing life-hammer, I'd hammer in the morning . . . but, I don't bitches."

2005-10-18T11:06:00.000-07:00

So my job is no longer paralyzing. Did it get better? Yes and no. How is this possible? My ass got canned.

Again, you may ask, how could this happen? You are a brilliant, brilliant man!

Maybe so, but there was a bit of a mix-up and it was taken out on the temp. So it goes. There are obvious upsides and downsides to this new and exciting development.

The upsides:

1. No longer have to wake up early.
2. No longer have to take the train.
3. More time to download good, legal, Christian music.
4. Getting to know the squirrely regulars at my local cafe / free wi-fi place.
5. Dreaming up new and innovative ways to not eat.
6. More time to listen to the shitty records my editor sends me to review (except for the new Anthrax "Anthrology" - that thing is dope as fuck).
7. Bonnie Prince Billy makes more sense now.

The downsides:

1. Not getting paid to write this thing anymore.
2. One step closer to homelessness.
3. No paychecks (except for the ones I write to myself).
4. Lots of time to make lists.

Well, it's seven to four in favor of joblessness. God closed a window and opened a chimney flue. Suffices to say, I'll be spending most of my days applying to jobs for which I am hilariously underqualified, waiting for the temp agency to set me up with something else I'll hate, and drinking coffee. And if anybody knows about anything in the Chicago area, let me know doodz. Otherwise, look for the Paypal button, coming soon.

826 Ways to Be Awkward

2005-10-14T08:18:00.000-07:00

Last night I went to the 826 Chicago Open House. I'm volunteering there as soon as they get their programs up and running, which should be soon. It's pretty exciting, actually. I'll get the opportunity to run workshops with kids, help out with events, and sell spy supplies at the Boring Store. And it's something I can actually feel good about spending time and energy on, as opposed to the soul-vaporizing life-hammer that is my day job. Dave Eggers was actually supposed to be there last night, but as projections for the birth of his child were off (it's due any minute, apparently), he couldn't attend. They brought in This American Life host Ira Glass instead, which is one reason among many that I had a horribly awkward, introverted experience last night. I don't usually like to do this kind of post, but here goes . . .

Really, the awkwardness is all my fault. 826CHI Directors Mara and Leah did a very nice job, transforming what was basically a concrete box into a bonafide (albeit rough-around-the-edges) workspace over the course of four days. New floors, painted walls, furniture, the whole deal. And there was plenty of beer, wine, champagne, and delightful cheeses and vegetables.

Now that I think about it, I don't know exactly what I was expecting. I had to rush to get home from work, change clothes, and hop on the trusty Western Bus in order to make it there on time. (I have this obsession with being on time or early to events that hinge on the laxity of their start times - concerts, open houses, parties, etc. It brings me no end of pain.) On the way there, I realized that it probably would have been appropriate to bring a friend. "I'll be fine," I figured. As soon as I walked up to the facade of the Boring Store (still covered over in butcher paper), I realized I probably would not be fine. I peeked in and somebody waved me over to a table, slapped a name tag on me, and shuttled me into what will eventually be the tutoring area of the space. There, a group of twenty-thirty-something hipsters milled about, picking at various 826 anthologies, reading the announcements to upcoming events . . . and talking to each other.

So here's the weird thing about 826: yes, it's a non-profit, and yes, it's staffed almost entirely by unpaid volunteers. But it's a fucking wasp's nest for hipsters. As Jessica pointed out to me, 826 is a charity, but you sometimes get the feeling that it doesn't quite count. This is purely because of its association with McSweeney's, and on one level it's totally irrational. It does everything good charities do: it doesn't make money, it helps to remedy a social quandry (the decline or stagnation of great - not good - reading and writing skills and enthusiasm about literature), and it does all of this with complete sincerity, not even the slightest hint of cynicism, at least that I can detect. On another level, though, it's utterly true. Looking around the room, the hipster to non-hipster ratio was at least 5-to-1 (staggering, even in Wicker Park). And they all looked like nice people, but you can't help feeling that they're there because McSweeney's is cool, and it's not like those lame, gritty charities where you have to deal with hungry, desperate people. Basically, sometimes it can feel like this is all for those absurd and oh-so-chimeric Scene Points. I can say, sort of embarassingly, that the hipness (declining or not) of McSweeney's played a role in my decision. That said, I am genuinely excited about working with kids who want to read and write.

So this problem is echoing in my head, even as I'm standing there in my tight jeans, my tight black sweater, and my black Asics (which are just tight enough). I wandered in, said hello to Mara, who I interviewed with last weekend, and then realized that I would have to actually do something. I poured some wine, perused some literature, and flitted my eyes around, realizing that every single other person was smart enough to bring somebody else. Anybody I saw standing alone was soon joined by a friend who had arrived a little late. So I sat and kind of waited, staring at the side of someone's head who looked familiar. His nametag read "Ira" and then the big, horn-rimmed glasses and good jeans locked into place.

That was when things started to go kind of bad, internally. I got tired of sitting awkwardly, and decided to mill, which soon deteriorated into a slight, stationary swaying. The whole time I couldn't quite decide if it was more awkward to sway near the wall or away from it. On the one hand, I didn't want to feel like a wallflower at a middle school dance, standing, waiting to be asked to put my hands on the hips of some Lolita and couple my swaying to hers (all at arm's length, of course). On the other hand, being stationary and awkward closer to the middle of the room seems almost like an exhibitionist gesture, like I'm trying to force you to confront my awkwardness, which only compounds said awkwardness to the point of an aggressive meta-awkwardness. That just does not seem like a good way to make friends. (Which [making friends] is another non-charitable, although benign, reason I decided to volunteer with 826.)

And the whole time Ira Glass is like a black hole. Towards the end of my first glass of wine, I wondered if I should just go up to him and say something like, "I don't know you, but you know me. Check the name tag. You rejected my internship application, dude." Then I mulled that line over in my head and tried to think of a way to articulate it so as to seem funny and ballsy, rather than creepy and angry. I decided there was no such way, and dropped it. A line like that would probably reassure him that rejecting my lovingly crafted, eloquent, and expansive application was the best possible call. And, I realized, he probably doesn't even see the applications that get rejection letters without an interview. (I'll thank the HR department I work in for making that abundantly clear.) This is when I realized that, if I reapply, I'm writing about this night. And, Ira Glass, I remember what you were wearing.

So I milled some more, deciding that swaying made me look either drunk or like I was humming a spiritual to myself, which is not a good way to celebrate Yom Kippur. At some point I briefly talked to somebody else who showed up alone, but he ran into the people who had interviewed with him, and started chatting with them. This was fine, as we didn't have anything in particular to talk about, and we were mostly talking, I believe, so that other people would know that we were no completely incapable of social exchange, and would then perhaps, these more outgoing, more attractive, witty people would, consider us as interesting, viable conversation partners. We were basically using each other to maneuver more deftly through the mini-socio-ecosystem that develops at functions like these, like animals that wear the scent of the pack as identification. Without it, you're cast out to mercy of the Veldt. It worked for him, not me, and I remained unscented and packless, scavenging what tidbits of conversation I could.

I had nothing to do but think about my situation, my enthusiasm for the entire affair having evaporated upon impact. I looked at the other partnerless volunteers dotting the walls, thinking about what social maladies they bore that disabled them from having a conversation, and realized that I had no desire to talk to any of them. Because there must be a reason they're here alone, I figured. And therein lies the paradox: all of us alone, thinking about how we don't want to, or can't, start a conversation with somebody else because that person must be awkward, or a bad conversationalist, or mean. So we go it alone, our own aloneness solidified by our misrecognition of another's aloneness as something alien to ours. Which it must be, necessarily, but it differs only in its particulars, in its shades and hues; not in its effects or, once you stop thinking about it, in how it looks, acts, in its half-smile.

After that last thought crossed my mind, I decided to leave. It was too contextless for me to get a foothold, and I could either try to unstick myself from my own headspace, or start waiting for the Damen Bus, which was bound to take a while. So I left. I'll probably never have to do that again, which is good. I'm still looking forward to the whole 826 thing, to working with the kids, to actually getting to meet people in a context that isn't completely overwhelming.

There. I promise I won't write something like that again unless it's really good. As a reward for making it through that indulgence, here's this piece of awesome:

I know it's old, but it never ceases to brighten my day.

Abscond! Avoiding PRC

2005-10-13T13:57:00.000-07:00

A quick gloss will show a puzzling topography on this word map. Abstract? Without a doubt. In opposition to basic jazz guitar harmony, a fifth is usually tough to avoid. I savor a fight, though. This constraint (first put down in long-form in a work by Wright that abducts its honorific from F. Scott's only titular protagonist) is akin to stocking a bank vault with only $1's, $2's, $10's, $20's, $100's, and also British Pounds, Tunisian Dinars, Botswanan Pulas, and Ugandan Schillings, but nothing from Japan or Russia or Brazil or Uruguay. Lincoln lifts his own chains, absconds from his prison, ducks a guard, and out into a murky night. It was a job run from within our organization, and I am that culprit, a fall guy giving aid to a bunch of Lincolns, still playing dumb for bossman upstairs. Our aging patriarch knows what's missing, but hasn't a notion how to find it. And I won't talk.

My own burglary, in this writing, is blatant. I confirm my humiliation at my lack of originality. My tonal modulation is nil and my vox is loyal to a bard of OuLiPo. Sorry. I purloin.

Tips for Drinking

2005-10-13T09:11:00.000-07:00

My antioxidized revelation also made me think of a drink recipe a friend gave me. I don't know what it's actually called, but since this friend was in town for the Intonation Festival in July, we'll call it a . . .

Red Harrington . . . in honor of one of the best sets I've ever seen.

2 shots of gin (and the good stuff, too . . . don't cheap out on this one)
6 ounces pomegranate juice
1 ounce lime juice
Garnish with positive thoughts

Chill glass, no ice. These fuckers are sweet and heavy, but delicious. You may only want one.

Come to think of it, a more appropriate drink to earn Tim Harrington's name would probably be this one . . .

39 ounces King Cobra
1 ounce sweat

Pour one ounce of Kind Cobra onto inner-city pavement, mix remainder with sweat of unsuspecting audience member. Drink as a shot.

Delicious Explosives - TANGY!

2005-10-13T08:33:00.000-07:00

Last night I went to the grocery store. The cashier had some problems running a price check on my pomegranate, and the bag girl turned to someone and said, "Hey, how much is a pomegrenade?" While at first I thought it was just a simple case of mispronunciation, I soon realized the girl was right. Look:

GRENADE

POMEGRENADE

Thank You, Jewel-Osco Bag Girl!

Pangram as Poundian Verse

2005-10-12T10:36:00.000-07:00

A hazel-black squid gropes waves:
Joy-mounted foam sex.

Python v. Alligator

2005-10-11T13:24:00.000-07:00

I didn't read Chris Bachelder's Bear v. Shark: the Novel, nor will I. It's got one of those titles that the novel itself could never top, like Mark Leyner's My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist, which I actually did read, and which I kind of wish I had just told people I had read instead of actually reading. Anything the mighty N. Katherine Hayles has to say about the latter novel is ten times more interesting than the novel itself. It consists mostly of a series of linked vignettes written in an absurdist, hypertrophied prose style. What happens doesn't quite matter, really. It's cool for about six pages, and then you start getting impatient, which is pretty bad for a novel that clocks in at 160 pages.

But the important thing is the title. Like one of my lit profs told an honors seminar, "Think about Judith Butler's Bodies That Matter. Well, just think about the title. The hell if I know if what the rest of the book has to do with it." This post started in the direction of somewhere besides titles, but it seems as if titles is where I'm going. (Yes, "Titles is where I'm going." Quote me on it.) Titles are sort of precarious things. They work best when they're incorporated as a formal aspect of the thing they title. Some famous examples of this are Duchamp's Fountain and, more recently, Hirst's over-publicized (or "seminal" if you prefer) but cool-looking The Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. Think of the difference between a title and a heading. A title is both a name and something that creates context (like "Lord" or "Marquis"). Or think of when someone tells you that the picture is both two faces looking at each other and a goblet.

Sometimes you don't need context, though. Sometimes the thing is better left without a title. Sometimes things are like this:

I know what this is because I saw it's title. Apparently, though, it was spotted from a helicopter. And even though I I can't tell exactly what's what, I get the gist. This entire entry was an excuse to put a picture of an alligator bursting through a python on my blog.

Biographing

2005-10-04T07:53:00.000-07:00

I've spent the last couple of days going over the faculty bios of various English programs across the country. Most bios are fairly predictable - two to three paragraphs long, outlining the basic trajectory of the faculty member's education, listing a few books, and describing whatever that person is currently working on. Some bios, though, either intentionally or accidentally, are just awesome.

This is simply a spectacular idea for a bio picture. I wonder if she either works in some field like "Death Studies," or if she's ugly. Or maybe, like DF Wallace's Madame Psychosis, she's too beautiful. I can imagine a floundering English department demanding that their homely faculty replace their bio pictures with other people younger, more attractive pictures. Could you resist someone who is both hot AND studies representations of the undead in late medieval literature? I know I couldn't.

There's poet James Tate, whose "Areas of Specialty" section seems aghast that you even have to ask. Should be replaced with, "Specialty? Being motherfucking James Tate."

This man is simply tired of your questions.

Although the process is arduous, expensive, and nerve wracking, applying to grad schools allows me to look forward to the day when I'll have my own out-of-focus picture and confusing, generic-sounding bio on a faculty web page.

A Minor Electrocution

2005-09-30T13:02:00.000-07:00

My office has just become more like an office. Being that it's already starting to get colder in Chicago (the low last night was 47 F), static electricity has been getting particularly bad. That, coupled with the numerous keycard access point around the office, means that whenever I have to stride across a stretch of carpet to open a door with my card, I get shocked. And I don't mean just a little snap. There is a clearly audible pop, followed by a clearly audible swear word, and a bright, blue spark. Fucker hurts, let me tell you. At first I thought it was just "one of those things," then the carpet thing and the fast-approaching cold weather thing clicked in, and I realized that this is how I'm going to have to live my life; if I want to open a door, I have to resign myself to a minor electrocution. I'm coming close to shorting out the keycard system, I'm pretty sure.

And my co-workers are impressed with my beard. They don't say anything, but I can tell.

Giant Squid Photographed!

2005-09-28T08:59:00.000-07:00

I'll bet it's all plump and juicy and not rubbery at all. Obviously the best of all possible calamari.

Fan Mail

2005-09-26T14:27:00.000-07:00

In a comment to my last entry, Anonymous said:

"Blog is informative . Dont't stop. This may be of interest to you; how to buy & sell everything, like music on interest free credit; pay whenever you want."

I'm so grateful to have so many readers who look to me not just as a source of entertainment, but also as an informative news outlet. Don't worry, Anonymous, I won't stop. Not as long as readers like you, Boob4Free, and BuyAHomeZeroDown keep reading. Thanks for the encouragement.

Yngwie Malmsteen

2005-09-26T13:38:00.000-07:00

Notable not so much for the fact of its existence, but for the barely-veiled ferocity of the author's devotion to his subject, this is my favorite Wikipedia entry.

I stumbled on this article a few months ago (well, obviously I was looking for it, but I nearly fell over after I read it), and while I could talk about the fact that this entry is interesting because its author is using an electronic reference guide as a sort of musico-cultural battle ground, whereby he defends certain values Malmsteen embodies (the figure of the "possessed virtuoso" - implicitly, then pretty much explicitly conjured by the link to the hilarious, drunken death threats Malmsteen issues to a fellow passenger aboard an airplane bound for Tokyo), which values the author obviously feels had lost a certain currency to the "simple," "emotional" leanings of "grunge" (although we should note that while my great-grandmother was eventually killed by a case of pneumonia, she was over 90 years old, and if it hadn't been the pneumonia, it might well have been the next brisk wind that did her in. So too with shred: it's time had come. "Grunge" [or whatever] just happened to be there), the reason it really stuck with me is because it's just so fucking funny that somebody loves Yngwie Malmsteen that much.

It's also kind of sad. Take this:

The most frequent criticism of Malmsteen is that his musical style focuses more on showing technical prowess than on substance, although a comparison between his different solos shows that he rarely chooses to play close to the edge of his skills or speed. Further, some of the lyrics employed in some of Malmsteen's songs have been questioned as commercial or "cheesy", but it is likely that these were merely a tool to gain more exposure and radio play in order to showcase his guitar playing. Instrumental passages such as "Sorrow" and "Far beyond the Sun" are generally considered to be his finest work.

The desperation of somebody just barely able to contain their love for Yngwie Malmsteen in the Wikipedia entry format is almost tragic. Think about the poor, discouraged kid, cheeks dusty with chimney soot, who waits breathlessly for the moment when the box office opens. There he buys his ticket and paces outside the club for days, weeks even, awaiting the hero's arrival, custom single-coil Di Marzio pick-ups aglow, strings like wound lightning, flames shooting from the unholy F's adorning his demon-lute, Malmsteen rolling in like an over-fucked twister. But instead, the evening of the show, the kid finds the axman bruised and incoherent, mumbling in the alley behind the club, ejected from his own show, drunk and disorderly. As the kid approaches, he can see the vomit carapace clinging to Malmsteen's battered, moth-eaten black tank-top, and what suddenly crystallizes from the would-be hero's now-flammable breath, the kid can hear as he gets closer, is an incantatory string of homophobic slurs, a polyglottal prism of profanities, Japanese, Swedish, English, and some untraceable Eastern European tongue.

The kid turns and walks out of the alley, kicks up some dust as he does so, and he can hear Malmsteen cough and choke on it, then vomit again and curse. The kid goes home and cries himself to sleep, and wakes up with his eyelashes bejeweled with salt from his own body. As he gets older, he comes to regard this image as a false memory, undercutting his own recollection of that moment in the alley with knowledge that the music industry had it in for Malmsteen from the start. That man in the alley was nothing but some industry disseminated emblem of everything the world had come to hate, no, envy about Malmsteen. It was a bad dream, a false past, and the kid would dedicate himself, in the years to come, to resurrecting that martyr from his tomb. He got himself a computer, went to college, fought the war, semiotic battles float invisible. And he preached, kicking up the words like dust, hoping to choke anybody who comes near enough to offer rebuke. He misses you, Yngwie Malmsteen. Don't let him down.

Life Kinks: It's Personal

2005-09-22T11:46:00.000-07:00

Whenever I tell people that I used to (and occasionally still do) write music reviews, a common reaction is, "Oh, you can't review a record. Music is just too *sigh* personal. It's too subjective. It's just a matter of taste." And part of me, the part of me that likes to find the good in everything and can appreciate every piece of art as, on some level, a personal risk on the part of the artist and a statement that, in a truly free world, would be respected as the extension by the artist of something unique to their cognitive and physiological processes, no matter how derivative seeming or dull, wants to agree.

That part of me, though, is very small and quiet. Most of me believes that most things, most anything, is pretty bad. Art, music, books, whatever. Almost all of it is bad. Pick a random CD from the Amazon.com warehouse and, again, it's probably just going to suck. And I think most people will acknowledge this about some things. Given that most people who dis middle-to-late 20th / 21st Century art know nothing about it, I would guess it would be pretty easy to get your average, middle-class, college-educated person to agree that, despite knowing deep down that they are, in fact, ignorant, almost all contemporary art is bad (except maybe the "simple" and famous stuff by Warhol or Rothko - their ability to disguise immense complexity as simplicity is perhaps the most complex thing about them).

But for some reason music always gets a pass. It's always assumed that, even if one person likes it, there must be something worthwhile about it. It's music, I listen to it, it affects me, therefore it is personal to ME. (Not personal from the artist's standpoint, e.g. every song on Rumors is about somebody in Fleetwod Mac. It seems correct to call Rumors personal in that sense, but totally incorrect to call it personal because "Gold Dust Woman" reminds me of that time I was shot down by my 8th Grade crush . . . and 9th, 10th, and 11th Grade crushes.) The syllogism should be clear - nobody calls the weather too personal.

My own theory, my personal (and therefore irrefutable) theory, is that music can simply "happen" in ways that other artforms can't. That is, especially since the advent of the iPod and file-sharing, you can listen to music while you do pretty much anything. Walking down the street, skydiving, having sex, you always have your jams with you. I guess I might feel the same way about Underworld as I do about Bjork's Homogenic if I had ever gotten laid while reading a DeLillo novel. But, barring an unexpected, incredibly long and patient tryst, that doesn't seem likely to happen.

This isn't to say, of course, that literature, paintings, & c. can't carry with them the same sort of autobiographical tinge. Baldwin's Another Country will always remind me of a particularly bizarre, peaceful time of my life, and Barth's The End of the Road will always remind me of a desperate one. But I think most people would say these associations are incidental, and wouldn't do much in the way of preventing me (if I'm smart and good) from making a smart and good assessment of them as works of art.

So, yeah, of course I feel strongly about certain records, because certain things happened while they were playing. Radiohead's "Blackstar" used to be a motherfucker to try and get through, we all know what it feels like. But, come on, too personal? You wouldn't hate if you ignored your own life, just once, for three and a half minutes.

Follow the Money

2005-09-20T13:44:00.000-07:00

Arnie's mandatory tallying-of-the-search-engine-hits post led me to check out my own. Apparently someone was directed here from here, which is totally baffling and delightful. Keep an eye on me, Chinese tech market watchers. I've got the magic.

Reading: Motherless Brooklyn

2005-09-13T11:54:00.000-07:00

Right now I'm only about 200 pages into Jonathan Lethem's novel Motherless Brooklyn, which is, so far, a semi-detective story about a grown-up orphan with Tourette's Syndrome. Though I haven't finished the book yet, it's been a bit of a surprising experience.

I used to not be able to start a book without finishing it. If I made it past page five, I would feel guilt-stricken and dumb if I didn't soldier on through the entire thing, regardless of how "over my head" it felt at the time (something in my 16-year-old brain told me stop trying with Ulysses around page three). It was a strange compulsion, a weird self-imposed guilt, the echoes of which remain. The danger of a compulsion like this is that, if I'm not enjoying what I'm reading, or at least not engaged with it, I won't absorb anything, or at least not enough to justify the time and effort spent hammering my way through, say, The Fountainhead or The Executioner's Song or East of Eden or any of at least a dozen long-ass books that I read because I felt that I should, not because I particularly enjoyed them. (Okay, I enjoyed most of The Executioner's Song, but the last 200 pages were excruciating.)

This drive manifested an opposing guilt as well, which was to feel guilty whenever I was reading something I genuinely enjoyed, but felt wasn't "heavy" enough to bulk up all of the "intellectual capital" (i.e. pretentious bragging rights) I believed I was amassing. I love Kurt Vonnegut, yet I used to feel a sickening twinge whenever I picked up one of his novels because something told me I should be reading something else, something more edifying, something with some history, canonical, & c. Ditto DF Wallace. Ditto biographies (mostly musicians - Mingus, Coltrane, Monk, Miles Davis, Jaco Pastorius . . . almost all jazz, except Jeff Buckley).

Obviously this helped me get through an undergrad degree in English with relative ease. It somehow felt "right" that I was reading what I was reading because it was endorsed by the complex of people and institutions that had somehow wheedled their way prematurely into my head and guts. It's a strange, palpable feeling, almost like being high, when you are doing exactly what you feel like you should be doing, and doing it pretty well. The upshot of this, of course, was that eventually I felt just fine about reading whatever the hell I wanted. I was suddenly freed of that guilt and set free to read whatever I wanted because after 15 hours of upper-division literature and writing classes, and God-knows-how-many hours outside of class, shit, I earned it.

Which brings me up to two recent decisions: 1) an upcoming tattoo (Vonnegut's line-drawing of a bomb with "Goodbye Blue Monday" scrawled across the side, ripped from Breakfast of Champions), and 2) a conscious decision to read more contemporary literature, including Motherless Brooklyn.

I'm not sure why I picked this novel. Partially because I bought it about 6 months ago at a thrift store in Tucson, and partially because of a recent trip to Brooklyn. And because I love swearing.

So far I'm not sure how I feel about the way that Lethem chooses to incorporate his narrator's Tourette's-induced "ticcing" into the text. On every page there is a random sampling of outbursts and the narrator, Lionel Essrog, explains his outbursts often and at length. Some of them are great ("Important monks, imported rugs, unimportant ducks" is one of my favorites), and some of them are just bursts of profanity, or garbled echoes of just-spoken dialogue. Around page 150 I began wondering when the explanations for the swearing were going to stop.

Then I realized the difficulty of the position Lethem has put himself in: he can't just stop explaining, expecting the reader to simply adjust, so he has to keep pointing out the tics, keep explaining them, and explaining them. He deals with this in a way that's either novel or cheap. At some point Lionel asks, "Have you noticed yet that I relate everything to my Tourette's? Yup, you guessed it, it's a tic. Counting is a symptom, but counting symptoms is also a symptom, a tic plus ultra. I've got meta-Tourette's." Everything in the book, the dialogue, the characters, everything, then, becomes a symptom of the disease about which the book is written.

This passage recontextualizes the entire novel, effectively inverting form and content. What you thought was the content - the amusing outbursts, Lionel's accounts of his obsessive-compulsive behavior, the constant counting - is actually symptomatic of the form that the novel takes - that is, the behavioral structure of Tourette's (at least as it's explained in the novel). Early on, Lionel refers to echolalia, a trademark Tourette's tic, and this echolalia continues in Lionel's behavior, the repetition of which kept making me say, "Jesus Christ, is he going to keep doing that?" Which is, of course, exactly what characters keep saying to Lionel in the book.

To this extent Lethem is extremely clever, but his style is, by necessity, annoying. That's fine, though. Occupational hazard. The first two-thirds of Motherless Brooklyn has been pretty good, even moving on occasion. If I were more melodramatic, I'd probably try to cook up some bullshit about sympathizing with Lionel Essrog because, I, too, was hindered by behaviors beyond my control. But that would be manipulative and a lie, mostly. True in the sense that we're all controlled by things like that, but a lie because I am no more than most other people. But my compulsion is pretty much gone now, and all it took was forking over tens of thousands of dollars of my parents' money to a state university. A good literary beating was all it took. Pretty much.

Katrina

2005-09-07T13:16:00.000-07:00

After the rains, the levee breaks, then the deluge.

I have a lot to say about the way Katrina fall-out has been handled. A lot of people have said it better than I can.

Instead of repeating what seems to be, swelling with a mourning that bolsters rage, a battle cry (incompetence, stupidity, racism, classism) I'd like to think of this post as some sort of milemarker. This is when it happened. I'm writing about not writing about it.

The Particle Board Anniversary

2005-09-02T09:38:00.000-07:00

This is Thingness's one-month anniversary. Or birthday, I guess. Though, since it is a thing, I suppose it's an anniversary.

ID v. ID

2005-08-31T11:51:00.000-07:00

. . . and let's not forget the abbreviation thereof: ID. Follow the metonyms and . . . identity, right? Easy enough, but is that sort of semantic connection as contentless as the "science" it leads away from (or straight towards, depending on your reasoning)?

Maybe.

Intelligent Design is a kind of identity politic in that it attempts to gird the whispy strands of our acids with concrete purpose. We were "designed" with purpose, after a certain image, therefore towards an end, or at an end even at the moment of that end's beginning. It counters the counterintuitive, sort-of-anarchic-but-not-really-when-you-think-about-it, trial by fire survivalism of Darwin, but not without, of course, introducing its own kind of anarchy.

As philosopher Daniel Dennett points out, ID is not really a science so much as a rhetorical tactic; this much is clear even to people like me, who don't know much about science - like pornography, I'd like to think, "I know it when I see it." The Wedge Strategy supports the rhetorical nature of the whole schema in its own weird, brilliant, scary way. Dennett also notes the way that ID wedged its way into public discourse was by somehow conjuring a "controversy" out of thin air: misunderstand a theory, provoke real scientists into arguing with you about it, then claim that, since there was an argument, there must be a controversy. The moment when rhetoric displaces evidence (and it's been a long fucking moment) is the same moment ideas cease to matter in and of themselves, or in the work they do as ideas. Ideas, evidence, rigor of any kind become the middle balls in a Newton's Cradle sitting on the desk of a Washington puppet grovelling after Special Interest campaign contributions. Political force uses them simply as carriers to cover up the source of momentum. Maybe this is why powerful men play pool in the movies.

ID's pathways are hardly circuitous, barely covered up: we want our identity, we want our God-given sense of purpose, we want to feel like we were made by Michaelangelo, not John Cage. And so many are willing to pay the price not by lowering the standards, but by changing the standards of standards (to steal a move from Louis Menand). We no longer want to look at ugly, messy, complicated evidence - we don't want to induce. We want to deduce - to find the truth we "feel" is right and hammer a pivot there in order that we might stay anchored, stable, able to claim our identity, rebuilding the streets around us to bring it all within our minute radius, leaving it all, everything, in excess of our grasp.

____________________

EPILOGUE

I had a roommate once. We got into a dispute because he didn't "feel it was right" that I let my girlfriend stay with me for a couple of months. She had nowhere else to go and she didn't have the money for a place of her own. Or a job. I told him that I covered her rent, and I paid her share of the bills, and she gave us a couch, a stereo, etc. Why, I asked, did he feel it was wrong? I asked him to express to me his reasoning. "Don't you ever feel anything?" he asked. I told him I did, but that I wouldn't necessarily expect other people to understand that, and if I wanted them to understand, I would inevitably have to explain to them some sort of line of thinking for why I felt the way I did, or it would make no sense. Explain it to me, I said again. He told me to close my eyes. I did and, while my eyes were closed, he pinched my arm. "What just happened?" he asked. "You pinched me," I said. Then he gave me a look of smug satisfaction, like we had solved the problem. Because he "felt" something and I also "felt" things (though not necessarily the same things he felt). He has a feeling, therefore it should be treated with the matter-of-factness of, well, a fact, treated as evidence that there was something wrong. I walked out of the room.

Life Kinks: Fundamentalist Conservative Jerk-Offs

2005-08-24T10:54:00.000-07:00

Cut your jeans off at the thigh and flex your track marks, it's time to go to NYC for a few days. But before I take off, I would like to note that Pat Robertson is now and always has been a fucking asshole. And he looks like a Planet of the Apes cast-away. Go back to your ape planet, you ape asshole! And take the Kansas State School Board with you. You can all go hang out in the icy nether-regions of space and not evolve together. Me, I'm working on evolving myself a third middle finger just for you guys.

EDIT: If anybody misses the sound of Trent Lott's voice, here's the Grand Dragon himself spinning his wheels on Iraq. How do we stop terrorism, Mr. Lott? "Let's hope [the terrorists] choose a different lot in life." "Hope" as a defense strategy? [Slow, Solemn Clapping]

Life Kinks: Cliche

2005-08-22T13:36:00.000-07:00

Recently a (now former) co-worker of mine let fly with the old bromide, "Great minds think alike," as we both washed our hands after using the restroom. While I imagine the comment would have carried with it a different weight had the situation been different (like say if we spontaneously began washing each other's hands), in context it was, regrettably, a cliche. I found myself sort of furious afterwards, moreso than usual, and I realized there was no good response. After thinking about it a bit more, I think it's because there actually is no good response to any cliche, which is ultimately what makes them so horrible.

If you're the kind of person who isn't into confrontation, and somebody mutters "One in the hand is worth two in the bush," you either force out a chuckle while restraining a vomit (which, by the way, is a superb display of precise muscular control if you can pull it off - if not, it's awkward but appropriate), or simply nod your head in assent. The only other option is say nothing, or go off on some sanctimonious tirade about the stupidity of cliches (and nobody wants to hear about that). And then, once attaining your consent that, yes, in fact the ancients were right, one in the hand is worth two in the bush, the other person walks off feeling all superior and smart (if they're one of those assholes who really believes that cliches mean anything) while you sit there slack-jawed. Or you vomit on them.

Unfortunately, this also grants cliches an unseemly and cheap rhetorical power - suddenly the debate is reconfigured into the cliche's terms and you have to argue your way out of a pre-fab "universal truth," or at least something that is true in the way that things that don't die are considered true simply because they're alive, which is to say they are self-evident in the most irreducible way - I see them and unless you want to get into some kind of pseudo-phenomenological debate about perception or Matrixy "How do you know this isn't the dream?" bullshit, they're real. What I'm trying to say is that cliches have not only lost the kind of specialness that comes with originality, wit, creativity, & c., but that they've also lost, in a strange paradox that you may or may not believe, despite they're being, at base, metaphors, and therefore always in the realm of abstraction, too concrete for language and devoid of that multi-valent translucence that makes words and strings of words special and good. Which I guess is why I've always sort of bristled at them (while sometimes trying to ironize them): they're like the crusty old neocons of language, which is reason enough to stick your finger down your throat.

Breaking News for Dorks

2005-08-18T12:39:00.000-07:00

Mark Z. Danielewski, author of House of Leaves, has announced, er, something. In what looks like a real, honest-to-God post on the House of Leaves message board, Danielewski is apparently soliciting ideas from his notoriously obsessive fans (myself among them) for inclusion in his latest project to be entitled That. Maybe. The man is pretty enigmatic in general, though, so this could all be a hoax or just a bored whim. But if not . . . I'm so excited, I'm practically eating the pig off the spit.

Reading: Harry Potter

2005-08-10T12:31:00.000-07:00

(Obsessively) reading Harry Potter & the Half-Blood Prince over the course of the last few days, I've often had pause to stop and think about what makes it so good, and in what ways it is good. It's not the kind of good that requires the use of the OED, or that entangles you in an elegant matrix of intertextual references and allusions, or even that will teach you any kind of important lesson, but the reading experience itself takes hold with the savage urgency of an addiction. So much of the pleasure (for me, anyway) seems to come from an almost physiological reaction to the text - I read HPHBP as soon as I can, whenever I can, feel annoyed and irritable when I am deprived of it before I'm ready to stop reading, and immerse myself in it as a kind of fantasy that just doesn't take shape with other books, even those I genuinely love.

Much of this pleasure simply comes from the amount of space J.K. Rowlings devotes to plot: the book is almost completely plot-driven, with probably 80% of the narrative devoted to exposition or to "first-order" plot advancement. In that way it's more like Hollywood cinema than a traditional novel: very little time given to the philosophical implications of the characters' decisions, setting descriptions are brief and utilitarian, and character behavior is, more often than not, goal-oriented (and, in a kind of delightful move, Rowlings has included more and more uncommon words in each subsequent Potter novel, forcing its masses of addicted adolescent fans - and, at least once, me - to expand their vocabularies).

The effect of all of this is that actually putting the novel down in the middle feels odd. On the level of the sentence, there's not much happening - no virtuoso displays of wordsmithery, no elegant, heartbreaking turns of phrase, just sheer narrative muscle. When a phone call interrupts your reading the entire point of reading a Harry Potter novel has also been suspended; you haven't got anything out of it because the only thing worth getting out of it is getting everything it has in it out of it; it's much more about the story than the discourse.

And of course it's very satisfying when you finish because what you've finished is the long, tortured thought that is the book in its entirety. Each sentence is a building block, unimportant without a picture of the entire structure. The teleology of reading such a novel is the drive to hammer home the keystone and erect the edifice in its totality. It's weird - this is not the type of novel I usually prefer to read.

The other thing, I think, that makes it so satisfying is how the magic in the novel functions. Magic in Harry Potter, in some sense, is the same as the writing that writes it - magic accomplishes tasks, and stands in for technology (that "magic" is just one of several elements in referential economy with the real situates Harry Potter in the realm of quasi-historical allegory anyway - but that's a different post). Magic is goal-oriented in much the same way as the characters and plot - all three can function as narrative pathways to a visible end. But the thing that makes it so absolutely satisfying is that it quantifies and "makes real" certain traits that usually have no concrete articulation. Words like "determination," "concentration," and the like usually, in my experience, simply mean "try harder." If I'm told that I'm not concentrating hard enough, or that I'm not determined enough, usually the person who is telling me to do those things is simply telling me to do whatever it was that I was doing before, only moreso. In the world of Harry Potter, though, it's different. Apparition, for example, is a verb as well as a noun in the world of the novel. To "apparate" is basically to teleport from one place to another. One of the things you have to do is "determine" where you want to apparate - that is, determination is a force you exert mentally. Now, usually this would mean "determine where you want to go, and use some other tool to get there," but in the case of Harry Potter determination itself, fierce concentration on a destination, will get you there. There is no medium through which determination moves - it is the agent of change in no abstract sense.

Going back, this seems to be another clue as to the reason why I personally feel so sucked in by the novels (aside from a few political reasons). The magic in Harry Potter, one of its biggest draws, is a code word for the unmediated realization of intellectual potential. Of course it is mediated is certain other ways, but by and large I get the sense that magic is a kind of metaphysical meritocracy whereby those who are born with natural talent excel, but those without are given the necessary tools to bring themselves up to snuff. Imagine, then, if among the multivalent meanings of "magic," one of them is in fact technology - imagine how we would live if we were forced to create that technology on our own, if, in some sense, its existence were predicated on whether or not it could be reproduced from the ground up by the individual. In a way Harry Potter itself builds and rebuilds this alternate technological model with each novel, suggesting that technology is not, in fact, an accumulation of better, faster, cleaner machines that come clunking to us through history; rather it may be the case that technology is the story we tell ourselves in order to organize our own moments of creation around a sleeker narrative, one clearly defined and teleological, totally rational, and not in the least magical.

Aphorism v. Slogan

2005-08-09T14:46:00.000-07:00

The difference between an aphorism and a slogan is about six words or one punctuation mark.

How To Disappear Incompletely

2005-08-05T09:36:00.000-07:00

Let's say you work in the business district of a very large city. And let's say that, though you have no emotional investment in that sort of thing, you end up working in one of its many corporate offices because you're new to the town and you need a paycheck to balance out your financially reckless recent past. Inevitably you wear the bare minimum uniform: white, button-down shirt, "slacks," black leather shoes, & c.

And inevitably you find that certain kinds of people who would maybe give you a second glance if you were walking around in what you normally wear (which outfit is really no big deal, but does set off certain signal flairs as to probable tastes in music, film, books, sex, and casual dining), regard you as a kind of pervasive, fine mist.

We've all had to do it, to a greater or lesser degree, and with a greater or lesser degree of enthusiasm. It's vaguely discomforting at best and completely shattering at worst. You feel as if a certain structure of which you have become a nodular automaton has bent you into an elbow in its pipework. So you get depressed and drink too much when you get home, and try as best you can to make the most of that suppressed impulsiveness you have to stifle.

But this sort of atmosphere IS conducive to some other thing, which you wouldn't really quite expect, and that is a kind of freedom afforded the invisible. In other words, you start your stint at this corporation sort of whistling to yourself on the elevator to pass the time, pausing to swallow hard as you ascend and the pressure inside your skull bulges out against the thinning pressure in the elevator. And then, as weeks pass and you get more comfortable, you suddenly find yourself humming, then half-singing, and then practically belting as you walk down the halls because, well, who the fuck knows who you are anyway? And what difference does it make? And why not wear the same thing every day, week in and week out? These are sort of nihilistic freedoms, sure, but freedoms afforded by committing yourself to the anonymity so necessary to that corporate dimension in which you are stranded, starving, a throbbing, pink brain in a remote-controlled body.

Tips for Drinking

2005-08-02T13:24:00.000-07:00

How to transmogrify cheap, plastic bottle, Winner's Cup-grade vodka into something somewhere between Absolut and Grey Goose:

1) Buy one (1) handle of cheap, plastic bottle, Winner's Cup grade vodka.

2) Pour contents of bottle into Brita pitcher filtration system. Allow contents to filter.

3) After filtration, pour contents of Brita pitcher into a separate container.

4) Pour contents of container BACK through Brita pitcher filtration system.

5) Repeat filtration upwards of twenty (20) times.

6) Enjoy a delightful, smooth, cheap vodka. And some weird-tasting water.

The things you lose of course (besides some memories of large portions of the evening) are the peripheral pleasures of drinking good vodka - the pleasure of the liquor store guy nodding his head in approval, the pleasure of removing a cork instead of a screw-off cap, the pleasure of casually mentioning to friends that you drained a bottle of Belvedere the previous evening like "What, that's how I roll." & c.

Paradoxically, it seems almost ludicrous NOT to blow your fucking lid when telling everyone within drunken rambling distance that you practically bootlegged some top shelf shit, pulled some frog/prince magic, and with one pass through the charcoal guts of your very own home purifyin' machine produced the frosty life-blood of Russia right in your very own kitchen. Good vodka is just expensive. Brita vodka is magic.