The Crying of Lot 49 - a novel(la) by Thomas Pynchon

Again, my main reference point is the 'like life' (I'm thinking that that's what art is, and, a theory, the more successfully like life it is, the better a piece of art it is - and like life is a very personal thing, but in varying degrees between concepts, ideas, and how they are expressed). This point is important to me because I'm only now learning life.

The Crying of Lot 49 was insane and uncertain with questions and enigmas (and tautology) and (arbitrary?) pattern recognition and synchronicities you couldn't be sure meant something or were just imagined - or more correctly, you knew they meant something, but you weren't sure if there meaning was in the external world or only the internal of characters.

The mystery of it was exciting and intriguing; but at the same time you knew it wouldn't be solved, maybe that it couldn't be solved because it was too involved with the very personal perception of people so you couldn't ever know the truth and just when you thought you did something else would turn it all around and the author certainly was not going to help you out but the whole time, even at the end ti was ok because it made the story like life (if magnified and artified) - all personal and uncertain and really about the things you experience, ie feel as real.

Also about Corporate America.

I read it in a new way - learnt to read how you're supposed to read, dwelling internally on words, images, descriptions, ideas of the types I used to dismiss, until they became felt and I recognised them as actually (internally) sensually accurate to my experience.

I learnt that with words you just have to try to get as close to the experience as you can. Not everyone will understand all the time because they express felt experience, which differs.

Obvious points turning into lessons as they become experienced ie felt ie my whole point.

Also, noticeable knowledgeable use of 'into' versus 'in to'.

JR - a novel, by William Gaddis

Something that I think I will end up saying a lot: consuming it is like living life.

That is one of the things I liked most about JR. From the beginning I thought it was amazing, but also tiresome, strangely paced with almost all dialogue, scenes that seem to go on way too long, transitions across varying degrees of space and time that were easy to miss, things that could be called gimmicks that were entertaining at first but then kept going (such as frantic yet stagnant pages with all the words from one side of confusing phone conversations). It wasn't until half way through its 726 or so pages (and probably about a month of very occasional reading) that I finally actually got into it. It was at this point I began to realise how like life the novel is, like a microcosm of life, like living all of life compressed into 700 pages. The occasional bits of non dialogue seemed complete in a way even though they actually weren't, were more like poetry or something that only contained necessary fragments that you had to piece together yourself to figure out what was going on. This is what the whole thing was like, sometimes in individual sentences or scenes in themselves or scenes combined with a few other scenes or scenes combined with all the other scenes (I use the words scene because it is written very much like a film or something, just without the visual aid most of the time, which means to have to work hard all the time to create -- and, ending the brackets but also keeping in them because this is the follow on point to both before and now, the whole book, whether you try or not, forces some degree of active creation so that you become a better person, a smarter person, by the very act of reading it.

For the moment

going to start doing short posts on things I consume (maybe in terms of food, but more likely 'the arts' esp books, also movies, tv shows, music etc.) when I feel like it. It will begin with a little backtracking

I've been feeling not so great lately. I can try and trace reasons although I'm not sure how legitimate they would be since whenever my mood changes in some way I add a shiny new explanation and remedy and then barely remember the ones before or exactly what events led up to them or not events maybe but just series of feelings or even series of decisions that lead to me feeling bad. When I got home this morning I felt a little like vomitting from depressedness maybe although I can't be sure that's why - maybe it's because I haven't eaten in a while or I'm just making it up because I can never be sure what I'm making up at the time only sometimes I can tell later but then even later than that I might learn something new and change my mind again - but I felt like throwing up and then maybe crawling into bed for the day. Prior to this was a train trip in which my mood had swung many times between feeling good from the music or feeling like I could write something to feeling there was is not enough time to consume all the books etc. I want to especially because I'm so slow at it and so there's no point bothering with it and - I'll say it - dread for the coming days of work and nothing to look forward to until sunday night when I will see jared next but only as a mild break from the dread since that will only be for a little while and then not again until tuesday. I'm bad. I need constant attention or I will hate myself. Which is silly. And maybe I've been encouraging feeling of badness, actively choosing them over other options but then maybe that's because that's kind of how I feel at the moment and I need to have a dark period so I can feel like I did after this mornings' not vomitting and deciding that no I would not crawl into bed for the day because that would be a bullshit choice that would maybe gratify me on some level but I'll just end up feeling like shit and more importantly what can I be to other people if that's all I am because that's a good reason not to let it go too far if there is a good reason for that and so I decided this is bullshit and there must be something I can do and then I had to urge to go on the computor and then I read Amanda's blog and then I felt like blogging myself because maybe this would help my delineate a few things? Things happen, suck it up. I'm ok now.


[Edit made later after feeling better and consequent better ability to analyse the situation]

Self-diagnosis: postpartum (postnatal) depression; symptoms include

• Sadness
• Hopelessness
• Low self-esteem
• Guilt
• Sleep disturbances
• Eating disturbances
• Inability to be comforted
• Exhaustion
• Emptiness
• Inability to enjoy things one previously enjoyed
• Social withdrawal
• Low or no energy
• Becoming easily frustrated
• Feeling inadequate in taking care of the baby (or feeling like one cannot take care of the baby)
• Impaired communication in speech and writing
• Spells of anger towards others
• Increased anxiety or panic attacks

So now I just have to find my baby. I think the government stole it.

all this talk of selves is making me hungry

I think the film in question is called Night of the Living Dead but I can't be sure, it's just too subtle and scarey to understand anything!



You can watch the entire movie on youtube. And when I say "you" I mean you, since my computor/internet connection couldn't possibly handle it.
My first embedded video! I'm moving up in the world.

Oh McSweeney's, you have all the advice I need to get through life. For example, if I wake up one day buried alive I now know how to handle the situation with confidence. Thank you Jim Stallard! Although I'm not sure what this means: HLY SHT BD ALV. GT HLP, BRG SHVL, OXY, BR (NT PBR) Somebody please help me understand. So far I've got "holy shit buried alive. Get help, bring shovel"... don't know what the rest means. Does anyone?

And omg more zombies plus Thriller world record! That many zombies together dancing like Michael Jackson, holy piss awesome

and pretending i was finally free

More Foster Wallace is my hero:
He just writes in a way that fits so perfectly with me that it seems specifically aimed at me sometimes.
I read this article he wrote about the Maine Lobster Festival - he was assigned to a regular reviewy piece and he ended up writing an incredibly accessible article about the ethics of eating meat, accessible in that it touches on the more complex arguments but sticks to the most basic one that is do the animals seem to show a preference to avoid pain? undeniably yes, and you can't really just avoid that (he has such a way of trying to look at all the sides of an issue not so it seems tedious or overly scrupulous but vital), which has made me more vegetarian, although this doesn't mean much because I already avoid meat where I can most of the time, but I'm not going to demand my mum only cook me vegetarian meals because that would be war.
DFW=swoon

and the birds flew around like the whole world was ending

Here's a graduation address given by David Foster Wallace. I find it perfect. He is my hero. Here's an excerpt if you don't want to read it all (but excerpts don't really capture it...):

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don't just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.

It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

"This is water."

"This is water."

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.

I wish you way more than luck.

I've been listening to Ani DiFranco's song Independence Day. It's not the style of thing I've been into in a while, pretty much all year, but it feels important to me right now for whatever reason.

<3

Here's a ninja poem by Emily Kwickinson:


Flower, Pretty Flower

Flower, pretty flower
I stop to smell you
you take my nose away.
Wait a minute,
why are you so sharp?
You are not a flower.
Now I have no nose,
face, bloody face.


Ask a ninja is the awesomest.

yo sukkafish, i'm falling before you, i'm falling before you

lol
Also, I got my external hard drive today. Measurements: a cd x my hand with all the fingers tight together x the end of a usb cabley thing, and probably the weight of those things. And it cost me $116.99 (including postage). Woo me! I think I might get a lap top. And last week I got firefox and vlc. I am on my way to catching up with all the cool kids