So there's a lesson that keeps being forced all the time and it's kind of integrated into myself but really not enough, so that it's something that comes up in thought reasonably frequently but doesn't govern all decisions and thoughts as much as it really should, so that situations still creep up that confront thoughts and show how biased they are even though this lesson is forced all the time and thought to have been learnt reasonably well, it clearly hasn't been learnt well enough. That lesson is about the depth of other people's existences independent of my own, that they have inner lives that certainly may have some common elements but that have a huge amount of differences as well. It seems simple, but it's so infrequently lived properly, deeply. So there's always this complaint about why the hell the lesson hasn't been learnt yet, how many times must it be taught to be learnt, as though somehow the brain is just supposed to do all the work with only minimal conscious input. Well that's probably not really how the brain works. You can't just expect it to develop itself. You have to actually do stuff. (This is, lolzily, another obvious lesson that needs the same sort of attention). So maybe what needs to be instituted is a rigorous process of thought deployment. Have to include the idea of other peoples' person-ness in everything all the time. There can be no exceptions. No indulgent giving in to allowing one-sided ideas to do their thing. Even if the concept can't be felt fully at all times, it must at least be thought of as fully as possible. If it's difficult, try just making up a story about the other person's life that lead them to act the way they do. Never let judgementalism have unchecked reign. It's a simple principle, easy - the only pitfall is times where willingness is lacking. But keep trying.

This is a practice that can be used for many things.

For Esme - With Love and Squalor, JD Salinger

Also ok. Good simple portraits of people, non judgmental simple realism. Unfortunately, I'm not that big a fan of normal realism. I wish I had read more lit criticism so I would have better language and understanding for these things. But I'll say that I do feel like this sort of realism isn't very realistic. It's too simple. I guess it's more like you're actually observing these people - no authorial insight, just seeing them - but the thing is that the tone of supposedly transparent language, to me, is never transparent, always get in the way and makes things not quite right, Because it tries to be transparent but it's most definitely shaping the subject through its tone, though all the words chosen. That said, I didn't hate its type of realist language - not the way I've been unable to stand things like Zeitoun - because at least it's slightly more in line with the characters than that terrible book's airy fairy shit. Although, reading over it now I can't discern that much of a difference between their styles, making me think that part of it has been my attitude coming into each book. But not all.

White Teeth, Zadie Smith

Now I'm going to post all at once on a few recently read books.

White Teeth was ok. Liked it kind of in spite of myself: enjoyed it although I didn't like like it as such. Full of important things to be written - race, class, gender etc. things. I'm glad I read it, but I don't really have much to say about it.

Yes, there are always the feelings and the aching desire to hold them and keep them. To become one with them, to cherish them forever.
I apologise for the cliches, but they seem the closest to right words I could come up with.

There's this specialness to things, inside me there, that seems powerful yet fragile - powerful in desire for things, fragile in the face of the reality of life, the difficultly of holding on to things.

Maybe it's not so difficult, I've just never managed to spend the necessary time.

Keeping these things is difficult because it involves being able to stay with them enough to experience them and then turn them into the right words.

Maybe.

Then again, the round about ways of keeping them could be more important - the way that some art evokes these things just by being about lots of things rather than trying to hone in on this singular feeling.

It feels like this poem I read once that said something about the worm of feeling in the heart...It was a strange image, using a literal worm, but ended up being so powerful. I'm going to go find it.

Found. Read the whole thing and ended up touched less by the worm part than all the rest of it. Going to reproduce here because I really love it, and I could be wrong but I think Bob might like it as well. Or at least some things about it remind of her. Unable to find it online so will type it.

Middle of the Way

Galway Kinnell

1

I wake in the night,

An old ache in the shoulder blades.

I lie amazed under the trees

That creak a little in the dark,

The giant trees of the world.

I lie on earth the way

Flames lie in the woodpile,

Or as an imprint, in sperm or egg, of what is to be.

I love the earth, and always

In its darkness I am a stranger.

2

6 A.M. Water frozen again. Melted it and made tea. Ate a raw egg and the last orange. Refreshed by a long sleep. the trail practically indistinguishable under 8" of snow. 9:30 A.M. Snow up to my knees in places. Sweat begins freezing under my shirt when I stop to rest. The woods are filled, anyway, with the windy noise of the first streams. 10:30 A.M. the sun at last. The snow starts to melt off the boughs at once, falling with little ticking sounds. Mist clouds are lying in the valleys. 11:45 A.M. Slow, glittering breakers roll in on the beaches ten miles away, very blue and calm. 12 noon. An inexplicable sense of joy, as if some happy news had been transmitted to me directly, by-passing the brain. 2 P.M. From the top of Gauldy I looked back into Hebo valley. Castle Rock sticks into a cloud. A cool breeze comes up from the valley, it is a fresh, earthly wind and tastes of snow and trees. It is not like those transcendental breezes that make the heart ache. It bring happiness. 2:30 P.M. Lost the trail. A woodpecker watches me wade about through the snow trying to locate it. The sun has gone back of the trees. 3:10 P.M. Still hunting for the trail. Getting cold. From an elevation I have an open view to the SE, a world of timberless, white hills, rolling, weirdly wrinkled. Above them a pale half moon. 3:45 P.M. Going on by map and compass. A minute ago a deer fled touching down every fifteen feet or so. 7:30 P.M. Made camp near the heart of Alder Creek. Trampled a bed into the snow and filled it with boughs. Concocted a little fire in the darkness. Ate pork and beans. A slug or two of whiskey burnt my throat. The night very clear. Very cold. That half moon is up there and a lot of stars have come out among the treetops. The fire has fallen to coals.

3

The coals go out,

The last smoke wavers up

Losing itself in the stars.

This is my first night to lie

In the uncreating dark.

In the human heart

There sleeps a green worm

That has spun the heart about itself,

And that shall dream itself black wings

One day to break free into the black sky.

I leave my eyes open,

I lie here and forget our life,

All I see is that we float out

Into the emptiness, among the great stars,

On this little vessel without lights.

I know that I love the day,

The sun on the mountain, the Pacific

Shiny and accomplishing itself in breakers,

But I know I live half alive in the world,

Half my life belongs to the wild darkness.

***

That poem is amazing to me. The way it perfectly balances all these things to make everything wonderful: mundane with profound, micro with macro, inspirational with sad. And just these piercing insights and beautiful images.

I think that if I write this on here I can own that feeling. Or if I print it in the perfect formatting and stick in in the perfect spot in my room. these days I think perhaps I look to outward things like that too much, as a direct response to my former exact opposite tendency. But it does seem to work often. It shouldn't, but it really does. I feel more at home in my room now that I've got a light that actually provides good light, and some pictures around the place, and a bit of organisation on bookshelves and floor space. I feel more at home at Jared's when I get there and clean it all myself. Then it feel like I can be there. These things I've always thought of as in truth internal things are so effected external.

When I click publish will all these feelings leave me because I'll feel like there right there on this blog for me to retrieve at any time? I'm going to go with yes; so, I have to take measures. This was supposed to be a measure, but it feels that more are required.

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, Italo Calvino

I don't really have anything to say about this one. It was ok. Currently uninterested in theory of reading.

White Noise, by Don DeLillo

So after thinking about it for a while I have decided that the whole novel is 'white noise' - it's about things (things debatable, but mostly accepted as being major themes) that are always there in modern (or mid '80s but still issues only in slightly different forms) western (specifically American, but to some degree transferable to others) consciousness but not too often made conscious. This gives the book a sense of unification of theme that turns out not to exist - it goes through stages where one issue seems and overarching thing to unify the whole book but then it's all but dropped for another. Instead, the overarching theme is 'white noise things'. This got to me a little because I'm so pedestrian in basic cognition I like to have a short phrase in my head that I can refer back to, to remember as the thing, so it was a bit jarring, and yet there was still a sense of unification in it all, which I think lies in this idea of exploring things that are white noise - it brings a sense of very quiet foreboding and yet also general uncertainty, including about the reality of the sense of foreboding. I think the only time actual white noise is explicitly acknowledged is when the protagonist is trying to claim his life, break through the figurative white noise.

So it uses a pretty typical framework - just a family, hanging around being a family - with some slight surrealism and/or hyperrealism and/or silliness, to deal with issues that are pretty central to all US postwar satirey stuff. Perhaps it was less super typical - in the issues it deals with - at the time it was written? I do get the sense that it's an important book - though that might mean it popularised the issues?

It was ok, filled with interesting and important issues, I only wish it wasn't so damn short. It should be 1000 pages long or something, not the measly 362 in small pages and large words so that I got through it in two days without even trying very hard. Because it was so short everything was just put out there and glossed over and would have been so much better and so much awesomer to read if it still had all the same things just fleshed out so much more. Things should be fleshed out.

Flaws in the Glass, by Patrick White

An autobiography, or more like an impressionistic portrait. Not a fan of his style - with its choosing random places to leave out punctuation in a way that I can't find solve into cohesion (doesn't mean there isn't a theory behind it, just that I can't find it) and general old timey lyricism and then also overly non lyrical parts. But I went with it as I've been doing and it ended up being ok - some nice ideas about and approaches to life that resonated with me. Overall, just ok.

Two or Three Things I Know About Her, a film by Jean-Luc Godard

Decided to post about this film on here. I should post more films, because it would be nice to catalogue and think on them more.

I was really in the mood for taking art things for what they are when I saw this, so despite the fact that it was mainly made up of musings on reality that can often be annoying because they can differ so much from one's own, I took them as they were and tried to experience them, and this ended up being awesome. Eye opening to ways of negotiating reality. I anchored my thoughts while watching to an idea I've been focusing on a lot because it seems to end up being a very fruitful approach to things despite its seeming limitations - how does one live in the modern world? In this vein, I imagine that the protagonist is a lot like the protagonist of The Book of Daniel - struggling and uncertain in the modern world - except that she is French instead of American (and my film watching has taught me that this is a very significant difference in approach to life, the French being a lot more into philosophising at length and living kind of more poetically) and that she hasn't latched on to the external obviously and self consciously fallacious outlet that the American male has.

It was all the greatest things about film to me - the way it just mused along in life, creating beauty and meaning by cutting up words with images in the way of poetry, so that it was full and interesting and Important. Plus I could have sympathy with the protagonist. Plus it was occasionally endearingly obvious, as things often fall to - like it ended with words not obviously related to a zoom out from some modern consumer goods laid out on a lawn. One of my favourite sort of films.

The Book of Daniel, by EL Doctorow

I ended up enjoying it very much in a way I didn't think I would. Because I wouldn't call it a masterpiece as some have apparently called it - with it's occasionally clunky language unsure if it belongs to the old writing's rococo style or the direction writing was moving more and more towards at the time (1970s USA; admittedly, Doctorow was educated in the past style but was trying to do the new, and a lot of people end up being sometimes awkwardly caught between the two, even today - DFW's answer to this is to embrace both as well as the awkwardness that comes with it, although if he gets it right could be debatable; plus, on the other hand, it tends to make for maybe even more annoying writing if you try to make everything to submit to one or the other as though they are completely distinct, like I was taught often in my writing course) and its maybe quite pedestrian ideas about the complex social and political issues it dealt with (the modern world, twentieth century USA, McCarthyism - although I suppose this is forgivable because he's a fiction writer, a casual observer, not an expert, and it's not like he didn't make an effort, or differed too much from some experts, plus I'm not sure to what extent this justifies anything [probably only to the extent that they make an effort that's not a complete fail]. In spite of everything, however, I decided from the beginning to take it for what it was and make what I could from it because I don't want to be a total hater - and this ended up being really rewarding, as it always tends to. It helped in my quest to bring myself in to the world and feel more at home in it - stories, knowledge, history seem to be always invaluable in this. It taught me more about enjoying writing that may not be my ideal style and how if you let yourself really feel the writing, really internalise what it's trying to get at, it ends up being surprisingly adequate to experience. I even let myself be taken in by its musings on the things of the modern world, such as the sort of weird culture that's embodied in Disneyland - the sort of things I've read about many times and decided to get over - and really think about it and get something from it.

So the conclusion is that lots of things are pretty awesome if you let them be, and thinking and learning is fun.

The Old Devils, by Kingsley Amis

I can't believe this novel won the supposedly important Booker Prize. Its style was the sort of realism that tries to be transparent words to draw attention to the story but which is always so shitty because it throws vitality of language out the window. Also, the characters were mostly deplorable. Also, there was a lot of telling instead of showing, because, as with lots of books like it, it has points - the sorts of observations about women or about men or about how people handle certain situations and why they do as they do - it wants to make of the sort that, if they're going to be pushed out there, can only be said and always sound stupid when said except to the people who agree with them, and so they make the non agreers incredulous and angry. Etc.

But I didn't resist it, tried to get why a book like this could win a damn prize, and came to the conclusion that somehow there is this hidden magic behind the words if you manage to ignore them that sucks you in a makes you feel something for people, even though when you think about it you don't actually feel anything for these people, it tricks you into feeling and half way wins you over, at least makes you feel like maybe you've experienced something of life, in a way.

Ulysses, James Joyce

I hardly got into it because I'm so damn slow and decided to sacrifice optimal reading experience for practicing speed, so I can't have a proper opinion on it. However, I think that basically it's really good and somewhat mindblowing - in its in-depth structure and goodness at the writings - except for its focus on the grotesquaries of day to day life, which were important as a thing to come out into the light once upon a time but now have been written and written so that there's nothing grand about revealing them in literature. Also other themes that have since been done to death - in fact, it reminded me very much of lots of things I don't really like that have come after, only its better and also more justifiable because it was In the Beginning. However, it also reminded me a very lot of DFW in different ways to the stupid ones. I can only assume that he loved the book and had read it many times and modeled his work on it to quite a degree - because of funny things like exhaustive detail of the objects in one draw, words not often used normally but noticeably used by Joyce and DFW like supine and akimbo, and a voice that perfectly blends a distant formal viewing of the world with the voice of the character in a way that borders on annoying sometimes but is still fun to read but is still difficult but is awesome.
I would like to read it again, but I will as always stop myself and move on to something else, which is possibly a silly idea.

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