low

spectrality

2010-08-24T07:36:00.002+02:00

I have an online presence. I go about my day on different websites, inputing data and receiving data in return. I give something of myself to a site and receive feedback. Some of these interactions are impersonal, such as the reading of an article. Others are intensely personal; the posting of photos on a profile with my name and information, twitter feeds of my location and what is on my mind, blogposts with essays and ruminations on my daily life. I even have alter egos, handles, avatars, I go by the many masks theorized by Nietzsche as fundamental to humanity in the sphere of modernity. I am fractured and reunited through text, image, and sound that I constitute and reconstitute with the use of a browser, my fingers, and my knowledge of the internet. I am cybernetic, the ghost in the machine.

I have been thinking about spectrality lately, which is to say I have been thinking of many concepts. Consider this, from dict.org:

118 Moby Thesaurus words for "spectral":
Barmecidal, Barmecide, airy, apparent, apparitional, astral,
autistic, bicolor, bicolored, cadaverous, chimeric, chromatic,
cold, colorful, colorific, coloring, colory, cool, corpselike,
crazy, daedal, deathlike, deceptive, delusional, delusionary,
delusive, delusory, dereistic, dichromatic, disembodied,
divers-colored, dreamlike, dreamy, ectoplasmic, eerie, erroneous,
ethereal, etheric, fallacious, false, fantastic, ghostish,
ghostlike, ghostly, ghosty, glowing, harlequin, harmonious,
illusional, illusionary, illusive, illusory, imaginary,
incorporeal, kaleidoscopic, many-colored, matching, medley,
misleading, monochromatic, monochrome, monochromic, motley,
multicolor, multicolored, multicolorous, ostensible, parti-color,
parti-colored, phantasmagoric, phantasmal, phantasmic, phantom,
phantomic, phantomlike, pigmentary, polychromatic, polychrome,
polychromic, prismal, prismatic, psychic, rainbow, seeming,
self-deceptive, self-deluding, shadowy, shot, shot through,
specious, specterlike, spiritual, spooky, supernatural,
supposititious, thunder and lightning, tinctorial, tingent, toning,
trichromatic, trichromic, tricolor, tricolored, two-tone, unactual,
unearthly, unfounded, unreal, unsubstantial, varicolored,
variegated, versicolor, versicolored, visionary, warm, weird,
wraithlike, wraithy

Interesting, no? Anyway, all this to say that I have been twittering, plurking, and facebooking instead of blogging. I'm not sure I like blogspot and I'm not sure if this persona fits anymore. I have enjoyed creating this site and contributing to it. It is a little like one of my former selves. We could be said to constantly reflect and deflect our former selves. Others' conceptions of us are always former selves, distorted by perception and personality. Life is truly movement in so many senses of the word as to be hermetic. Simply smiling and listening is a way of understanding. But I'm just rambling. Until next time. -low

Tayzee Nub by Tim Rutili

2010-05-24T06:59:00.003+02:00

Song by Califone.

Maisy, don't wait around
Steal another day
Competition dancers drop and
snap their necks and fold.

Shade too careful when you come
weather slices through your ghost
open your mouth, what are you
wrecking now?

Half-assed translation thrown
all your devices laid
weather holds you like a child then
puts you back down.

Never could pull the trigger
even if you tried
open your mouth, what are you
wrecking now?

Small behind the metal
swallow everything
cello words to noise
ripening and laced.

The satellites are growing vines.

Three Poems

2010-05-13T21:02:00.005+02:00

Separated

there's no use asking
whether or not we will
we won't. and it's so hard
telling ourselves that.

Two Clicks

this screen luminescent
nauseating intoxicating
ah press of flesh what
is that? of it I am not
just a request, a quest

Thanksgiving

ah there it is
to forget for
awhile what is
missing what
always will be
missing my dear
oh. if only i
could be what
you want me to
be. but what is
that? oh lips.
oh mood. oh
mealtime.

to my southeast asian friends

2010-04-27T12:04:00.001+02:00

this is a comment from the corvid TED talk:

Mar 16 2010: having been turned onto "ted" only last week,a lovely coincidence happened to me today.Arriving at my place of work[a WATSU pool in Beit Ziet], I came across an upturned garbage bin,I parked my car and walked back the 20/30 paces to right the mess ,as I picked up the boxes and household trash I saw what appeared to be a dead crow lying in one of the open boxes,supprised I gave it a second glance and saw that it was breathing.Your heart goes out, who could treat life with so little regard,I picked up the box, took it to my workshop, spoon fed it some water,and thought I'd take it on my way home to some place of rescue.so what [all of the last week all I have been watching is ted] does one do,WIKI crow and see what ther is to learn...of all the links there what did I hit on ,you guessed THIS page.Back to ted. TED is .......I have not enough space .....promote TED is all I'm doing at the moment....A LIGHT HOUSE OF HOPE,INSPIRATION AND A BEACON FOR ALL HUMANITY TO FOLLOW.....THANKYOU !!!!!

amazing like kanye west. am i right?

so I'm supposed to write for this class I'm sitting in on.

2010-04-12T22:12:00.002+02:00

so I'm in this classroom right now and it's so freaking serene.
like, I could hear a pin drop or a phone vibrate. And it's nice
since really what is there to say in such a setting? Tony read
us this poem, the flea by donne, but I'm more interested in the
Kaplan University advertisement next to it. Kaplan is a testing
academy meant to teach you how to improve your ACT, SAT, GRE, +
LSAT scores or your money (not) back. There are questions as to
the effectiveness of Kaplan, and of course there is the question:
why are we teaching people how to take a test as opposed to edu-
-cating them? This makes me want to read Foucault or work at Kaplan,
one. I have a lot of actual writing to do, but this is the writing
I am doing because I want to feel part of a class that I am sitting
in on. Most of my 'fellow' students are using paper and a pen. Lord
knows what they're going on about. Maybe a few will read it out loud
and I can judge them magnanimously. Perhaps I could even speak up and
by tone of voice and choice of language express admiration or disgust
at their futile words that will have no effect on reality save a few
moments in a small classroom. But, you get what you can. Better than
sleeping or eating too much or smoking weed or stealing a car or nursing
your grandmother with infant formula. Why is there a poetry month? It's
not like we actually do anything about it. This whole tendency to name
something and consider that an action is pretty BS IMO. It's ineffectual
and the left has been placated far too long on renaming and reclassifying.
What about changing or improving the actual conditions? We have been running
simulations on life far too long. I say we take life itself into our own hands.

nowave: on broken literature

2010-03-22T22:20:00.006+01:00

so I've been doing a lot of reading and listening

i've been riding a nowave. meanwhile i've been reading:

I consider Soupault's book to be a piece of broken literature. the plot is absurdly simple. the narrator, who is not named or described (the reader is left to wonder if he even exists except as witness), encounters a prostitute named Georgette and follows her to the scene of a crime. He comes to know the characters involved in the crime through following her as she takes the same route through Paris every night. His fascination with her leads him to engage with her brother and the underground group of pimps and thieves that surround her.

The narrator makes equal mention both of the situation that surrounds him immediately and the impression it forms in his mind. The city becomes a character of its own as it assumes the same dual nature as Georgette herself. As day approaches Georgette's appearance changes and she becomes an everyday woman: she buys groceries and lives with her brother who paints. Soupault finds her split personality uncanny. Perhaps because it reveals his own manifold nature.

Last Nights in Paris is about the fleet and transitory nature of identity. Georgette is who she is by virtue of the men who control her movements and the city that surrounds her.

I felt she was not the same since I had learned that she could be Georgette of the day and Georgette of the night, that two women, as different from each other as darkness and light, dwelt in that pale and supple body, that shadow dressed in black. She seemed to attract mystery as water attracts the light. About her danced I know not what cold and inviting flame. Georgette possessed the charm of the invisible. (Soupault, 82)

I am reminded when reading this book that we are by the people around us, by the city we wake up in, and by chance. Each of these forces confront the narrator at different points as he finds his life consumed in understanding the mystery of Georgette. What the reader comes to understand is that the mystery is that there is no mystery. Georgette is a whore, the witnessed scene is a witnessed scene, and chance can be cruel to those who look for significance. See here too the upside-down noir of Gombrowicz's Cosmos or the strange play of time in Schulz's Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass.

The Enlightenment believed in and reinforced the belief in a unified self. This is reflected in the European novel. In Soupault's Dada novel, identify unravels and is seen as contingent and accidental.

Music, too, is shifting from concepts of harmony, cohesion, and song structure. It is breaking apart. This is not only seen in the proliferation of independent music but also in the music itself. Nowave represents a conscious disavowal of the production techniques and perfectionism in modern sound. It represents, for me, the same direction and motivations that surround Soupault's fine book.

From killshaman.com, Night Control's record label:

“Life Control” sees Night Control venturing further into the dark depths of sonic experimentation and ambience, circling back around to Derrida’s deconstruction theory and applying it to pop music. Sounds are manipulated, affected and tortured into loosely structured pop gems covered in organic acoustic guitars, blown out guitars and some of the most interested mixes of live and programmed drums.

-low-

2010-02-23T00:39:00.001+01:00

My vision of paradise recently shattered, I had no recourse, nowhere to turn. To whom do I devote my desire to love? A spiritual, an emotional, a libidinal economic problem. Such beauty in the smallest places. I’m suddenly overthrown, and my vision is restored: I received a postcard.

Let me explain: an evening in January, unseasonably warm. My old mailbox of advertisements and bills became, for a moment, the place of dreams. How could I describe my fevered first reading, the way my eyes focused on each cursive letter, the way the form and content mingled to become one marvelous whole? How could I describe her tempestuous flow, her sonorous lines that mingle beauty and death so as to render them inextricable?

She writes of nightgowns, diamond earrings, the luxurious red fabric mess of her bed. She imagines how her body will look when she is found after the poison has taken hold: the imprint of lipstick on the wine glass,

At the decisive moment, she steps away from her fate, preferring to dream of window shopping. I breathed a sigh of relief, remembering that a moment is the most one can ask of perfection. I then wondered, where do I go from here? What reply is possible? Her words stand alone, resolute, light as stone. The stamp beside reads, ‘Letters mingle souls.’ Now I know.

dancing

2010-02-14T01:50:00.005+01:00

ecstatic moments of flight at the oddest moments

when at our lowest, or coffee in September afternoon

we spin a record and forget about the bills, the four

dollars a day, the sixes and sevens that slowly consume

us into immolation. Yes, that record we'll remember until

that way then we can't imagine. yes, that record, blink your

eyes three times to remember forever this laughter and forgetting.

Run Ronnie Run

2010-01-07T22:28:00.004+01:00

How to Show Horses and Win often reads like a self-help book. Chapter Ten is about horse judges. Ronnie explains that horse judges are subjective, do not like bribes, do not like being questioned about their judging, do not like tardiness or being stared at, and are in fact human beings. Could the same not be said for judgmental people in general? Or the judgmental gaze? Or, to make a reach, criticism itself?

There is also a singlemindedness and repetition on the virtue of success. The cover shows Ronnie winning a blue ribbon for the horse he shows in a competition. Ronnie shows us visually as well as textually how to show horses and how to win. Winning here is the symbolic object of the relationship between Ronnie and the horse. Viewed parasitically, Ronnie receives social acceptance and a place in society through his excellence with horses, not to mention the money to feed, clothe, and shelter himself and his family. The show horse, in exchange, also receives social acceptance and sustenance, a pasture to roam in, whatever may please him. There is often affection between horse and rider, between man and animal: see here Donna Haraway's When Species Meet.

Simply piling up facts to argue: Ronnie and his horse are both hosts and parasites: signifiers and signified. The saddle is the interface, the screen, on which their shared meaning and desire is transmitted. That one rides, and one is ridden: does this imply superiority? If so, who is to say that the horse is not, metaphorically speaking, riding Ronnie?

There is another parasitical relation in this text in its use of footnotes. On Chapter Two Ronnie writes that there isn't enough space to write extensively on conditioning a horse: instead he footnotes two other books from Farnam Horse Press. In effect the footnote operates as an advertisement inserted within the text. The text is penetrated, commercialized. This is true of the back inside-cover that displays color photographs of twenty four horse manuals: How to Shoe Your Horse, How to Break and Train the Western Horse, Know All About Tack, and my favorite, Riding the Gymkhana Winner. Also included are the two footnoted works, Know Practical Horse Feeding and How to Recognize Horse Health Problems.

These advertisements, far from detracting the work as a whole, inform the text in a surprisingly novel and interesting way. We come to recognize this book in relation to its publisher, its author, and us as readers. Our relation to this book as general, literary, and academic readers is different from those who read it to gain knowledge in showing horses. The act of criticism acknowledges a distance or a difference between the object of the book and its audience and the meaning generated by writing paradoxically remains outside of writing itself.

Ronnie Richards has put a lot of thought and ability into the preparation of his book, and it seems likely that it will become a handbook for showpeople everywhere. (Back Jacket)

Winning here means acceptance of this parasitical relationship within the context of horse showing. I remember my own experiences in basketball, in particular the ceremony for receiving a ribbon for sixth place in a junior high basketball tournament. It was said that we 'placed.' To place is to be put into context. The ribbon was more than a gesture to acknowledge our placement and participation in the tournament; it was also a contract, however unwitting the participants were. At that moment a symbol was transferred and a new relation began.

If the ribbon, the symbol, were refused? Openly, this would be hostile, frowned upon. I'm reminded of the scene in David James Duncan's Brothers K when Peter, the son of a minor league pitcher, quits his high school team upon receiving their MVP award. He is then ostrasized by his parents, their teammates, and the coaching staff. Thus the dilemma of the signfied.

For most of us, if not all, our sixth place ribbons were refused either by collecting dust in some forgotten drawer or thrown away in defiance after the ceremony. To us the medals did not matter. Something else mattered. We were excersizing our power to reject this relation. Our pride resisted the awards we did not care for, did not earn, and even to us teenagers did not matter.

...

Ronnie Richards is a winner. He cares very much for blue ribbons. The back jacket explains that, 'Ronnie got into the winning habit back in 1953 when he started showing his mare, Nita, who won 42 classes in a row and was never defeated in Junior Stock Horse Competition.'

Of course there is the question of why success relates to the ability of the author to explain how to show horses. Michael Jordan might be one of the best basketball players in history, but its very likely that, were he to try, he could not write a helpful how-to guide on mercilessly destroying his competition, on consistently beating the Detroit Pistons, and how to make clutch shots when NBA championships are on the line. These skills, which are in part what sets him above his competition, are incommunicable. I think that excellence itself is incommunicable, that something is inevitably lost. Words in their commonality are unable to show excellence. What occurs as a result is that often the best literature is that which its subject is what is common. The more universal the writing, the more excellent. Do we not see this in the clipped prose of America and England in the past fifty years?

This is why writing is never a solitary act.

Can a great artist of life, of living life itself, successfully convert his ideas and strategy to writing? What of literature in which the subject is life itself? Are these books written by exceptional human beings? This you must answer yourself. Too many examples come to my mind, and yet I worry the exceptions (numerous as they are) may not prove the rule.

I think that it might be testament to Ronnie Richards' genius for showing horses that his book is, formally speaking, a failure. Not only formally: it is not even listed on Amazon. One of the few images of it online was on a New Zealand craigslist. I found my copy on a used book cart in the market of a grocery store. I traded Melville's Redburn for it which I still consider a fair trade. He might move the Melville, but I'm guessing he'd carried this book a long time. Where did he get it? I wish I had asked.

Top 25 Albums of 2009

2009-12-23T17:35:00.006+01:00

1. Califone - All My Friends Are Funeral Singers

2. Bill Callahan - Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle

3. Fever Ray - Fever Ray

4. Jim O'Rourke - The Visitor

5. Wye Oak - The Knot

6. Michael Hurley - Parsnip Snips
7. Lucky Dragons - Open Power
8. A Sunny Day in Glasgow - Ashes Grammar
9. Magnolia Electric Co. - Josephine
10. Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavilion
11. Black Moth Super Rainbow - Eating Us
12. Bachelorette - My Electric Family
13. Yo La Tengo - Popular Songs
14. Night Control - Death Control
15. Burial & Four Tet - Untitled
16. Broadcast and Focus Group - Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age
17. Phosphorescent - To Willie
18. Bibio - Ambivalence Avenue
19. Thee Oh Sees - Dog Poison
20. Atlas Sound - Logos
21. Bob Dylan - Together Through Life
22. Wavves - Wavvves
23. Fruit Bats - The Ruminant Band
24. Barn Owl - The Conjurer
25. Young Jesse - Dear Forest

outpost 54

2009-08-22T22:05:00.003+02:00

Ah this malaise, this time scented with jasmine and paradox.
I cringe at the thought of this moment recorded, the sheer
lack of material to focus on with these startled pages. Creation
and commonalities, the buses that pass by I wonder at this
magnetic moment, so surreal, where realities press against
each other in eternal creation. Our dream worlds are so
palpable now, the conversations exist now and forever and I
listen in, stunned. What makes us what we are? Rhythm, current
the liquid nature of us entire. I can only type and type, hoping
the dots connect in other minds because they do not connect
here. Pass through entire and come back relaxed. Some day
we will laugh about this separation, this angst, this possession
of you and me and everyone else entire. Someday we will laugh.

what I do

2009-07-04T20:58:00.004+02:00

what I do

2009-06-03T10:50:00.002+02:00

:collage:

scattered among cynical relics
and anthrological signposts
are adamantine eyes
perceiving folded moth wing
dust, and hollow bird bones

drone electric at night

tattered air ducts house
plastic tape butterflies
and bug pincushions
as tickytack spider devours
its prey in web of macrame

smogesis

2009-04-28T22:35:00.010+02:00

'With the grace of a corpse in a riptide I let go.
and I slide, slide, slide, downriver.'

The corpse is a body without a soul. Movement comes from without. There is a certain grace to the purely material. There are no motives, no psychologies, only a way of being. Death does not restrict movement but merely renders it passive. The 'letting go' is both a loss of reason and a loss of intention. There is also the image itself: the corpse dragged (drug) downriver.

'With an empty case, by my side,
An empty case, that's my crime."

Empty case as: lack, empty pride, unfulfilled potentiality, silence. The body written here as body without soul, an 'empty case.' Yet why, by his side, is it a crime? If love is what is meant by the empty case, as love-as-representation, empty of the object-beloved itself, as Truth Serum* suggests, then his crime is loving his representation of the world, rather than the world itself. What if love comes from memory? We could say that inside the case is memory, love for the world, the soul of the body. The separation of body and soul becomes his crime.

"And I sing 'Say Valley Maker' to keep from cursing,
Yes I sing, 'Say Valley Maker' to keep from cursing.
River oh... river end.
River oh... river end.
River go... river bend."

Water is low, what is valley is forged by river and glacier. Water is essential to all life. The river clearly represents becoming and the dynamism of life, Bergson's elan vital. To sing or to curse: Pound writes that art either loves or hates. By letting go as a corpse in riptide, we make peace with our dying nature, we come to understand the separation of mind and body, to understand our 'crime' in framing what is inherently empty: object a petit.

"Take me through the sweet valley, where your heart blooms blooms blooms,
Take me through the sweet valley, where your heart is covered in dew."

Hey valley maker!

"And when the river dries, will you bury me in wood?
Where the river dries, will you bury me in stone?"

Genesis: you are the dust of the world breathed into by the holy spirit. Will you bury me in a coffin, sealed by stone? Will you prolong the decay of my death? The case will be tossed away. All that will remain come death is the body.

'Well I never really realized death is what it meant to make it on my own'

Two very personal interpretations of this line: first, everything we do is in part because of others. There is only death in the personal, the individual. It is through our work in collective that our creation takes on life and is recognized.

Another: it was only after the fall that death entered into paradise. With death, or rather the conception of our own death, humanity takes its fate into its own hands and becomes creator.

"Cause there is no love, where there is no obstacle,
and there is no love, where there is no bramble.
And there is no love, on the hacked away plateau,
and there is no love, in the unerring.
And there is no love in the one true path."

Love occurs with differentiation. Can an asexual or hermaphroditic organism love itself? Love occurs at the gap between, precisely when he 'lets go and slides downriver.' Love needs obstacles, bramble, love needs distance and a space between ourselves and the beloved. When we ask the Bergsonian question, 'Why this rather than that?' we could also ask, 'Why love this rather than that?' Love comes at the desiring of that which we do not have. Love takes us over, love is love is love is erring in the bramble on unhacked plateau off the one true path.

"Well I cantered out here, and now I'm galloping back."

Travel, the movement-image, Bergson. His becoming presents the world in which matter is constantly changing, only stopped in this process by duration. The life breathed into us by God now splinters, quakes, geysers, phoenixes.

"So bury me in wood, and I will splinter,
bury me in stone, and I will quake.
Bury me in water, and I will geyser,
bury me in fire, and I'm gonna phoenix,
I'm gonna phoenix."

youth is excess:body paradox:love

2009-04-22T01:23:00.009+02:00

The body is such a fickle, monstrous creature. I say fickle because its desires wash over me, food-desire, water-desire, coffee-desire, sleep-desire. Is it more liberating to deny or affirm these desires? I ask because I know tiredness, hunger, caffeine-sickness. Without that which our bodies crave they empty, they no longer work. The strongest smell, sharpest pain, the look of desire, all of it washes over incomprehensible. As Jack tells us, "With insomnia, nothing's real. Everything is far away. Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy." Bataille's economic theory of excess is a dream during a sleep I was not able to take. The sun bothers me, my big toe gets in my way. I'd rather crawl to freedom in order to better smell the earth.

To get drunk or to allow intensity to flow over one's body is one and the same. We accept the shortcomings of drinking and drunkenness: bad judgment, clouded senses, the hangover, the guilt. We learn to not drink to excess, to moderate the passions. The body revolts, reorganizes, becomes homeostatic.

Is not Poe's Eureka a beautiful lie? For Nietzsche the value of ideas comes not from their implicit truth but their ability to sustain and empower life. Why not get drunk, if it sustain you? The lifelong alcoholic stops drinking and grows ten years older in two weeks; Werther finds himself unloved and grows despondent and suicidal; Rimbaud gives up the pen and dies a long death. Addiction is but a possibility realized and integrated into the body. My addictions are my organs. Would I rather have coffee or my left arm?

It is a fine feeling, being desired. It fills that emptiness we all have, does it not? The itch that perpetually needs scratched. Mother won't you hold me? To be perpetually held, to feel one's flows and intensities provoked. Excess: a beautiful positive feedback loop, a candle burning at both ends. Deleuze & Guattari sleep, live their waking lives, fight - fight and are fought - seek their place, experience untold happiness and brilliant defeats; they penetrate and are penetrated; they love.

Bodies inevitably reform their organs, restratify; to fight is to perceive the other, to fight is to cut the other... the other what? further; to seek and to penetrate the other is to seek and penetrate ourselves; what we gain we immediately lose; flow as illustrated by capital; flow as energy that waxes and wanes in excess and lack. The body of intensities never understands itself as part of a whole, a continuum of motion.

"They will not let you experiment in peace."

I have been getting drunk all my life. Rural life is either deadly or cancerous. My experiences don't mean a damn thing when all is impersonal sweep-swept flows. When I critique familiar symbols that codify my flows into temporary right order I can better understand my singularity, my being as an event in the cosmos of becoming. Each of our books will be a book of symbols, of particular code that maps out this flow of life.

Books should be excess and not lack. Books should provoke and prescribe in the manner of a physician. I think of Miller, Artaud, Cendrars, Celine, Kerouac, Lao Tzu, Borges, Dostoyevsky, Huysmann, Heller, Nietzsche, Proust. Series upon series of botched books, imperfect paens to unrestricted flows on the plane of immanence.

Deleuze loves a good paradox. A divine contradiction. Contradictions are an interesting phenomenon, and they have a strange way of multiplying when encountered. Take decadent art, for example, the way that it combines the content of the lowly, degenerate, and ill with the form of the beautiful and the sublime. Insofar as we embody contradictions in our desires, drives, and instincts, and insofar as we are saints and sinners, angels and demons, lazy bastards and busy geniuses, we can recognize and understand this contradictory art form much better than art which is directed in form and content to beauty alone.

It may be true that we only perceive that which shares attributes with us, and we perceive clearer those which share more attributes with us. And what could possibly share more attributes with us than another human being? There is the body, the voice, the words expressed, even the pheromones that we perceive unconsciously. Compared to the most exquisite book or painting the human being is a colossus. And to share any or many of these hundredfold attributes is a powerful thing, one that multiplies... Yet that is not enough.

No, there must also be a desire for that which is other than us. That desiring-other, a reaching out for attributes that correspond to that feeling of attraction. So to perceive, we must share attributes, yet to desire, there must be an other that we perceive and desire most strongly that which contains multitudes alike and different.

Love: read about it, breathe it, whisper it, live it, die for it, confirm or deny it, maybe feel it and definitely miss it when its gone. An indirect argument is the most seductive one. Love is always a transgression, not only because it combines sexuality and friendship. Love is a powerful narcotic. To say the words, "I love you" for the first time is among the most powerful narcotics.

initial experiments with the nc-10

2009-04-21T01:19:00.004+02:00

I have a new conduit for my writing and my thoughts: the Samsung NC-10. It is an amazing device. It weighs three pounds, has great specs, and has a 93% keyboard. I have particularly small hands so this is actually an advantage. I find my notes for Lester's class have improved considerably and will help when I start my paper on Witkiewicz. I could sing its praises for pages. For what it is, a portable writing machine, it is one of the finest machines in history.

Yet the volume of writing that I have produced has been minimal - I could attribute this to a dry spell in my creativity, but I think the problem is a deeper one, rooted in the way I approach the machine itself. One difficulty is that I am an incredibly fast typist. So much so that i can outpace the thoughts in my head and type-arrive at them before I have even finished! This blogpost is typed intentionally wrong - or intentionally slow. I find myself going back into the old patterns.

I'm so used to writing on pen and paper. The flow of words and their cursive structure is important to me. However I feel a lot of time is lost by writing in pen and paper because I invariably have to transcribe onto computer anyway. If only it were possible for me to harness that creative energy that the pen and paper present through the medium of typing. I think by slowing down and taking my time with each word, typing perhaps as slow as I write, my approach to type-writing may come closer to the writing-ideal.

I think to myself, 'what a worthless post,' though I do understand the importance of thinking about how we transmit our thoughts onto paper, canvas, train cars, or hard drives. If we go along with McLuhan's famous assertion, 'The Medium is the Message,' what does that say about blogging? To go along with the Ticket That Exploded, is it important to know that the book was typewritten?

This just makes me want to check out Kittler's Grammophone, Film, Typewriter in order to better understand this phenomenon.

Ah, my first rant in awhile! so be it.

a secret song

2009-04-01T02:01:00.003+02:00

i sit as on a throne and I sing a secret song:

what thou lov'st well remains,

the rest is dross

what thou lov'st well is thy true heritage

whose world, or mie or theirs

or is it of none?

first came the seen, then thus the palpable

elysium, though it were in the hall fo hell

what thou lov'st well is thy true heritage

on the rationalities of individuals & populations

2009-03-28T13:30:00.004+01:00

We are animals. All the signs are there, we are warm blooded mammals, everyone knows this. To think otherwise in the West is to be religious or insane. Humans have suppressed and sublimated their animal instincts and have distanced themselves from their creative & destructive tendencies. To deny instinctual thinking and behavior is to rebel against animal nature. Just what is and isn't 'instinctual' is impossible for me to know, but I do believe that in many situations it is possible to act 'otherwise.' And if this were not the case, or believed to not be the case, law would lose nearly all meaning. Also, guilt.

Human society as biopolitic can be understood as a tangled, rhizomatic web of law and biology. Multiple species can be studied as subject to the laws of human society. Postmodernists like Foucault understand societal behavior through a biopolitical framework. Our status as animals and as species changed the way institutions treat human subjects and subsequently how researchers and philosophers conceive of history and freedom.

In a way, evolution can explain every event and no event. Evolution as a mechanism of life exists in cells, organisms, species, up to life itself. Freud theorized we instinctually crave our mother's libidinal energy: her attention. For those conscious of such possible instinctual motives, the past has a definite influence on our behavior. Consciousness is in many ways based on the past.

Human societies develop rhizomatically and so evolutionary thinking is limited in this regard. Whereas we can draw linear geneologies for individuals and species, cultural events have multiple meanings. We can trace the development of species based on fossil records and observed behavior, but we cannot with any certainty completely understand a rhizomatic event. We could go along with E.O. Wilson and say that everything can be explained evolutionarily, but wouldn't we then just be repeating Hegel's mistake by subsuming everything into a single system? In this case it may be Godel's incompleteness theorem that offers us a way out.

Bioart is the genetic & aesthetic creation & integration of biology into artwork. One of bioart's aims is to offer a different perspective and set of values to the advancements of science. We read into Kac's luminescent bunny & DNA-synthesizing Genesis project. We can also ask: is a necessity such as food a cultural force and creative impetus? If so, we can understand agriculture & selective breeding as cultural forces that altered our lives before history in our uncharted genetic pre-Mendelian past. Any attempt at an evolutionary theory of, say, ancient Egypt would be nearly impossible to verify. Evolutionary theory does not bring us close to an understanding of historical forces. Evotheory does give us a better understanding of our place on the planet by providing the tool of species-thinking. We can consider thoughts & modes of behavior as representative of a species, but understanding which ones is very difficult. This is because many meanings are attached to an action, and all understanding of meaning is relative. I can only speak for myself.

i want to try to be nice to everyone

2009-03-25T20:20:00.005+01:00

i had a dream to end all dreams
realized that none of the dreams of anyone i care about will come true
realized the pleasures attained by the same will pale compare to others
realized i need more sun

microfiction:6fragments

2009-03-18T11:15:00.005+01:00

if you're going to read something by me read this:

virb.com/codystahl/posts/text/2316445

new music up at virb / i've really enjoyed reading final posts
a lot have improved their writing substantially / ^^

cs

molloy:basara

2009-03-18T09:37:00.014+01:00

There is a familial relationship between Beckett’s Malone and Basara’s Fritz in Chinese Letter: the father and the son. I feel a familiarity with Basara through youth – Fritz's struggle with the imperative to write reminds me of my own. His is a clever Oulipian exercise of two intimidating + possibly-imagined men demanding a hundred pages of writing, any writing at all.

It is a paean to schizophrenic thought, often comic. Basara presents an image of thought that is cast out, clinicized, operated on. In the same way literature itself has its scalpel to writers, there is an imperative to entertain, to have purpose, to present a story. Fritz as writer and human is presented as an affliction, something to be treated, a malignant growth, a tumor. His risk is that his worthless hundred pages will be unreadable, and his effort will be completely futile. How many Fritzs are out there?

Yet Beckett the father remains in a certain sense unapproachable to me.

Plot, character, setting – these anachronisms bore us. We can no longer honestly depict the psychologically-driven bourgeoisie subject that emerged with the rise of the novel in the 19^th century. Benjamin writes that bourgeois institutions "make it possible for people to avoid the sight of the dying." This applies to institutions of health and of art. These same clinical and literary institutions play key roles in both texts: both Molloy & Fritz write in part to resist the clinical, psychological, and ideological influences that alter and destroy what makes them unique, what makes them subject. They also struggle against the novel itself.

Eternity + death are very big subjects. Beckett, by focusing on the small death of Molloy in dismal+scrutinizing detail, gives us a perspective on death-itself without euphemizing, packaging or commodifying death. For Molloy, nothing is more real than nothing. His nihilism, groundlessness, and close proximity to death as an individual stand in stark contrast to the antiseptic & comforting Whispering Glades in Waugh's Loved One, the great satyric necropolis, a theme park for death. Commercializing death is a cannibal act.

Nothing will be bought or sold at the death of Molloy + Fritz, nothing of real value. And yet these are texts that give American students a different perspective and meaning to their own lives and death. By giving voice to an invalid and a schizophrenic, these authors show how to understand our own contingent, subjective perspective + uniqueness in the world. These are lines of resistance to the dominant mode of thought. Beckett allows us the chance to reflect, and perhaps take a course more in tune with the currents life has given us & with our own individual natures.

confrontations+definitions of humanity

2009-03-17T04:23:00.003+01:00

Calvin's most recent post brought to mind my conception of how the progression of technology alters our definitions of humanity. We've come a long way from Plato, but the minds that have progressed are, genetically speaking, nearly identical. If anything, it has been the technology around us that has reshaped our knowledge and understanding of our place of the universe.

For instance: during the mechanical+industrial revolutions of the 19th and 20th century, the focus was on humans as tool-users; we walked upright and used our opposable thumbs to create advanced tools to kill prey, sow crops, and build homes + granaries.

Now one of the predominant lines of thinking in terms of human evolution is our social development + communication technologies (Miller, Jolly, Zimmer, et al). Does this not parallel the information+technology explosion of the late 20th-early 21st century?

If technologies (religious, political, communicative, etc.) shape our ideas and conceptions of humanity, what happens when these technologies define human life as expendable (or to use your phrase, obsolete)? I am thinking here specifically of the holocaust & the military mechanisms of the two World Wars.

Advanced technologies like nanotechnology aren't necessary to reach this point because it's already been reached. This informs a lot of the confrontations with nihilism+meaninglessness found in the filth + the ticket that exploded.

I'm done with trying to come up with blanket definitions of humanity. I'm more interested in the individual and their ideological and philosophical liberation. There is so much out there that wants to define your life to suit the limited purposes of a given agenda: including this class, including plurk, including your own limited ego perspective. Who to trust? Perhaps that, outside you, which gives your life meaning + significance.

And if that's technology, plurk, blogging, etc. then all the better. I'm just not sure yet.

an image of death in post-war europe

2009-03-12T19:33:00.004+01:00

Death is an image. Life and death are tied irrevocably together, each informing the meaning of the other. The ways that we conceive death will always be fundamentally based in thought that is alive, or not-dead. That said we cannot objectively understand or value death. Because death cannot be understood rationally it is imagined both on an individual and on a cultural level. This image of death could be said to be a cousin to Deleuze's famous 'image of thought' in that it rhizomatically develops from the influence of multiple systems (familial, societal, national, etc.) and that it is based on a point in time.

Death is constantly being reinvented. The death-for-a-cause, the Christian martyrdom, is a spectre that haunts Western thought. True meaning in the modern world could be considered 'that which is worth dying for,' both in the sense of every moment being that in which we are dying and the act of martyrdom itself. To go along with Bataille, we could say that martyrdom is the ritualization of dying.

Modernity and industrialization radically changed the way that the Western world conceived of death. Death itself became industrialized: machine guns killed dozens in the time it took to fire and reload a rifle; tanks and grenades destroyed groups of men, thousands were killed in battles and millions were exterminated in the holocaust. Where Marx saw monetary value systems as viral and destructive to other value systems, Adorno saw the pointless extermination of the Jews as destructive to pre-modern Western conceptions of death. The holocaust became the historical Real event that proved death's meaninglessness.

If death itself can only be an image, then dying is its interaction with reality. There are several aspects to dying that humans as living organisms face. Our lives are contingent, and at any moment we could cease to be. There is a sense that, because we age, we are perpetually dying. It could be said that we are 'progressing' toward death with each day. Heidegger argues that until we understand our status as a dying organism and recognize the contingent nature of our existence, we can never fully value or understand life.

The art of Christian Boltanski captures the tensions and interactions between singular and collective conceptions of dying in post-war Europe. Death is a reoccurring theme in Boltanski's work. His genius may be said in collecting the debris and refuse of this industry of death. The installation of clothing taken from the Jews during the holocaust shows how a number like six million can cloud the realization that each of the six million died separate, individually. Each article of clothing takes on significance as a trace and reminder of this dark time in human history. On the other hand, Boltanski avoids a direct condemnation of the Nazis by his humanizing installation of pictures of Germans in the 1930s at weddings, parties, and in uniform. He says, “It is a work that gathers together 1,600 images of human beings, it is above all a work about loss of identity.”

Boltanski’s art presents the effect of mass movements and industrialization: a loss of human identity, the 'small memory' that is “...everything that forms us and creates us.” No longer able to recognize ourselves within the context of a state, an army, or a family, we lose the ability to recognize the other's identity. Boltanski's art presses against the viewer's own conception of themselves amongst their imagined communities. We, too, are but an image, a scrap of clothing, a handwritten note eventually to be among the articles of the dead to one day disappear completely from the minds of men.

His art is an attempt at the impossible to close this gap between death and dying. The more we detach ourselves from death itself by our denial of dying, the more susceptible we are to living thoughtlessly or living through our collective imagination, the same collective imagination that exterminated millions of people. Fundamentally Boltanski's work is a symptom of Europe still coming to grips with and understanding the Second World War and its implications in the Western understanding of the human mind and soul.

from the hagakure

2009-03-08T02:52:00.003+01:00

A certain swordsman in his declining years said the following:

In one's life, there are levels in the pursuit of study. In the lowest level, a person studies but nothing comes of it, and he feels that both he and others are unskillful. At this point he is worthless. In the middle level he is still useless but is aware of his own insufficiencies and can also see the insufficiencies of others. In a higher level he has pride concerning his own ability, rejoices in praise from others, and laments the lack of ability in his fellows. This man has worth. In the highest level a man has the look of knowing nothing.

These are the levels in general. But there is one transcending level, and this is the most excellent of all. This person is aware of the endlessness of entering deeply into a certain Way and never thinks of himself as having finished. He truly knows his own insufficiencies and never in his whole life thinks that he has succeeded. He has no thoughts of pride but with self-abasement knows the Way to the end. It is said that Master Yagyu once remarked, “I do not know the way to defeat others, but the way to defeat myself.”

Throughout your life advance daily, becoming more skillful than yesterday, more skillful than today. This is never-ending.

...our origins being aqueous...

2009-02-25T01:12:00.002+01:00

More Cendrars, from Moravagine:

I have already said that the activity of consciousness is a congenital hallucination. Our origins being aqueous, our life is the perpetual rhythm of tepid waters. We have water in our stomachs and in our ears. We perceive the rhythm of the universe through the peritoneum, which is our cosmic tympanum, a collective sense of touch. Of our individual senses the first in rank is our hearing, which perceives the rhythm of our own particular and individual life. This is why all diseases begin with auditory troubles which are, like the manifestations of marine life, keys to the past and precursors of an inexhaustible process of becoming. It was, therefore, none of my business as a doctor to attempt to hinder such manifestations. I envisaged, rather, the possibility of multiplying these tonic accidents and achieving, through a prodigious subversion, the perfect accord of a new harmony. The future.

I should have liked to open all cages, all zoos, all prisons, all lunatic asylums, see the great wild ones liberated and study the development of an unheard-of kind of human life. And if I later abandoned my Machiavellian plans for struggle and worldly success, if I turned away from my career, if I deliberately renounced the glory that my first writings already promised me, it was because i met, in the course of my duties at the English Farm, the supurb creature who to lead me to a grandstand seat at a tremendous spectacle of revolution and transformation, the transvaluation of all social values and of life itself.

I let an incurable escape.

But that is a story in itself, the story of a friendship.

immateriality + irrationality

2009-02-24T15:18:00.007+01:00

One of the tasks of philosophy and literature in the 20th and 21st centuries is to map an 'immaterial but intelligible' world beyond Judeo-Christian conceptions of God, the soul, and original sin. We're using new words; the word 'soul' itself is a holdover, a laziness, a call to tradition. It is also egotistical, 'this 'I' is me, not that staring at me in the mirror.' The soul is a pretty answer to the question 'what is behind, or beside, or beyond... myself? and those I love?' For the getting to the bottom of something, or behind it, or beside it, is one of the main preoccupations of Western thought. There is a pull to believe the image and consider the image everything, and a contradictory yet complimentary provocation to find out what is behind that image. Did not Nietzsche refute the soul-body dualism? Let us, once again, move past the soul.

(I say us, when I mean my soul)

We're just beginning to understand that there are big ideas, often irrational, that can consume and control masses of humanity in direct contradiction to their rational self-interest. We're beginning to map these irrationalities; Deleuze's BwO and War Machine are just two concepts that scratch at the surface of the immaterial world we still are so far from understanding. There is so much still to map, so many concepts left to invent, that the dwindling number of real philosophers presents the very real possibility that this irrational world will never be understood. Perhaps that is an impossibility; perhaps understanding our irrational impulses through the rational building of concepts is quixotic.

Marc Guillaume's method consists of “. . . operating like an archeologist or paleontologist: finding the piece of rock or bone fragment from which we can construct a reality. Paleontologists attempt to reconstruct entire animals from bits of skeleton. They recreate something that cannot be proven. Yet it corresponds to a supposed reality.” That may be close as we can get to truth in this new frontier, the frontier of the irrational.

To understand the irrational, we must become irrational. We must think irrationally, act irrationally, and formulate concepts we know in advance will fail. There was certainty in rationality, it was cleverly mapped by Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, and others. Europe held on to that rationality, arguably one of its most beautiful cultural achievements, up until the Great War. It can do so philosophically no longer.

Rayuela, Julio Cortazar. Testament of Youth, Vera Brittain.
Essays, George Orwell. Radical Alterity, Jean Baudrillard + Marc Guillaume.

the air was full of flicker ghosts

2009-02-20T11:11:00.007+01:00

BURROWS WROTE, AND I QUOTE:
The air was full of flicker ghosts who move with the speed of light through orgasms of the world -- tentative beings taking form for a few seconds in copulations of light.

Flickr, light, world, being taking form for a few seconds in copulation or
The worldbeing took form for a few seconds in a copulation. light light or
Light, the worldbeing takes form a few seconds in copulation or
light, cop beings move with the speed of light through orgasms of the world

or maybe speed of light moves through all orgasms and tentative beings take form for a few seconds in copulations of light and all orgasms are of the world or

this is your body speaking rather the word virus taking your body the constructed word body and making it yours. next thing you're using 'I' and 'me' and even the academic 'we' and assuming personhood. ain't nothing words but a talking machine, talk talk talk. some people can keep it inside but some have the compulsion to talk. I know a woman, she will talk to you for hours long as you stand there. you can't get a word in edgewise. I think of her husband + her sons who will never know silence around her.

imagine if I taught her how to write. I mean the manual act of just sitting down at a typewriter and not doing anything else. what if she were no longer able to speak because of a freak accident? I've no doubt this woman would write something, and anything would be better than hear her going on and on about how her kids drive her crazy and how they drive her to drink, and when it snowed she told us all about the tire chains she found on the road. some yup doesn't give a fuck about their tire chains and here she goes on and on.

eventually you just have to walk away.

anything is possible

2009-02-18T10:56:00.005+01:00

The most difficult thing in art is to create something that looks entirely like itself. -gessert-

pound------------------------------------------------------

"daphne with her thighs in bark stretches toward me her leafy hands," --subjectively. In the stuffed-satin drawing-room I await

The Lady Valentine's commands, knowing my coat has never been of precisely the fashion to stimulate, in her, a durable passion;

doubtful, somewhat, of the value of well-gowned approbation, of literary effort, but never of The Lady Valentine's vocation:

poetry, her border of ideas, the edge, uncertain, but a means of blending with other strata where the lower and the higher have ending;

a hook to catch the Lady Jane's attention, a modulation toward the theatre, also, in the case of revolution, a possible friend and comforter.

------------------------------------------------------pound

spectral justice

the spectrality of justice within the etymological context of just-joust is interesting. I was asked 'Is justice a farce?' and I replied with the querent's earlier formulation 'justice is a spectral joust.' I would say the law is one expression of the socius comprised of different beings. their conflicts, compromises, and agreements within the socius comprise this 'spectral joust.' the law basically speaking cannot be situated anywhere -it can only be understood by reading its signs and observing its effects.

while this deleuzian analysis is helpful, we could also look at this from a marxian class-based analysis using historical materialism, from a sociological perspective, any number of perspectives. I wonder, why is the critical-literary argument so seductive? it rests not on material or factual information of the concept in question but rather on the intentions of the creator of a work of art and the impressions made by the viewer. it has a power and a certain intuitive truth because we find ourselves in a world of media, of image. Vlusser's farcical world is not a perpetual reality, but the one we ourselves live in. the very act of analysis is often a 'filling' with meaning, and there is the danger of reading into a text something that is not there, or rather, something 'farcical.' perhaps I should add: cyclical.

good day outside tribe of life and mine and yours yr so good + natural arms appeal and cause you're so close
close to mine and eyeing my face so i can take you out at breakfast time yes you're nice all so violent all so sure figured out
we be patient time for a nap and now ah if i could just fix the clock i'd take you out at breakfast time

wow, nashville skyline, sesame street, zappa, talking heads, buddy holly,

be in me as the eternal moods of the bleak wind, and not as transient things are--
gaiety of flowers. have me in the strong loneliness of sunless cliffs and of grey waters.
let the gods speak softly of us in days hereafter, the shadowy flowers of orcus remember thee.

anything is possible.

smallidea

2009-02-16T06:32:00.005+01:00

what if I were cut up nietzsche's aphoristic gay science into a small book around 72 pages? I could have 50+ pgs. of nietzsche, 20+ pgs. of my footnotes on the text. the book will be designed to be to provide an impression of Nietzsche's thought in one sitting.

this book works particularly well for this approach because N's aphorisms constitute possibilities of thought. there is not a system to be uncovered in my selection; merely what I find to be interesting and relevant. There will be photos and drawings, perhaps of work influenced or inspired by nietzsche.

i'm most excited about the footnoting. I'll be able to make connections to the text in an active way. i often criticize translators for overly footnoting and endnoting a text. I feel the best translators stay out of your way. ralph manheim is a great example.

anyway a potential final prject
cs

below: a letter from N.

megara: the card game of punishment

2009-02-07T02:15:00.002+01:00

This is a card game for 3-13 players

The Stakes: At the beginning of the game, all players agree on a punishment or dare for the loser. Examples include: bloodletting, buying a round of drinks, being slapped with wet noodles, suicide karaoke, having to shake a cops' hand and being punched by every other player. Feel free to be creative and/or cruel in your choice of punishment.

The Deck: For each player a value in the deck is taken out and used during play. For instance, if there are six players, the K, Q, J, 10, 9 & 8 cards of all four suits are used.

The Rules: Players sit at a table or in a circle on the floor. The players are dealt four cards by a different dealer each round. Unless a player has four of a kind after the deal, the dealer will call 'pass' and each player will pass one card face down to the left. This will continue until a player has four of a kind.

When a player has four of a kind they slap their hand in the middle of the table. Each player then puts their hand on top of the original hand. The player with the last hand to reach the pile receives a letter 'M'. Each time a player loses a round they receive a letter until they reach 'M-E-G-A-R-A.' The player who reaches MEGARA loses the game and must go through with the punishment.

haiku for a spectral future

2009-02-06T11:34:00.000+01:00

When you are displayed
It sends shivers down my spine.
Never felt so alone.

viviangirls - wheredoyourunto

2009-02-03T09:03:00.003+01:00

notebook1.doc

2009-02-02T05:45:00.001+01:00

brought on by our instincts and playground lies silences we tell unbroken truths forgotten our roads breaking down soon the times the engine that keeps together wild eye days skipping stones important rymes are forgetten less yes no soon we forget lessthere are no more outlets are our commodity stealing heat sickness ties together callous hands caress hearts can you believe can you imagine the riches beneath us if only we had a shovel a few hundred years and inclination

luminous

2009-02-01T06:06:00.002+01:00

Sunlight flickers, addictions press and the smiles of those I love have been less loving. Yet the thunks, smiles, and loud music of my house refresh me for I no longer have to be on my best behavior. Last night I slept through it all, Nirvana's In Utero cranked at midnight, the party, the beers downed, joints smoked, laughs shared. This is Washington. I slept 8-2, eighteen hours. I have not felt this together in some time. In front of me, cup of drip, ominous. I heard a beautiful college girl say 'cup of drip' as one word yesterday, a perfect blossom of language on her pink unknowing lips. I will never give that lip or the first sip up, not till my dying day.

The ride begins again.

Astonishment Abonishment. Novelty in life. Legilelo. To swim where we once swam. Woman as such. Is love a shortcut? Astonishment is older than humanity. It is part brain-stem. Perhaps God was astonished at the first amoeba, the first emotion. The first taste of opium ever. Two weeks ago friends of mine put mushroom chocolates out to dry and they were devoured by soon-to-be-astonished raccoons.

Pen to paper, recorded.
Actual field mice, devoured.
Not until later, though, not until
the train of thought vanishes and only memory can remain.
In this way I am Platonic, my astonishment is based on memory.
Do we remember our brain-stem?
Trauma-yes. Bliss-yes. Fed-yes.

Those memories that stay and pass on, how chosen? My bike trip, her breasts. I almost prefer remembrance/looking to experience/touching. Long whiskered sleepless nights on Oregon beaches, clean shaven sleepless nights with hot press of flesh. I'm going to try for the kingdom, if I can, because it makes me feel like I'm a man. I was born a thousand years ago.

My body swings through legless urban trips . . . Polka-dots and pastels, Pinochet, red-tiled roofs on sunny Oregonic oceanic dreamlike fictionscapes! O, those glasses with thin frames and teeth so white that bite your lips when you get too close . . . No more astonishing being born twice than once . . . Ain't no flow going to pass through me unmolested. Buoyancy on a brilliant wave called luckless life and love I know that is a contradiction! Para-fucking-dox! God loves you, don't call back! So creepy, so creepy, get the fuck away from me paramour, listen to the radio, don't decide! This is not a figurative, full-mouth flourishing kiss.

While this is an unwritten part of life that refuses to repeat itself. Language unincarnate.

What paper, what now? What figure, what plow? Faure's encapsulating mind that shines like Taine on centuries-old canvas. Talking about vicious Velasquez like he's quiet Spanish prodigy-child with a dark side . . . Yes I do know you don't. Easter in New York filled with hollow coughs and crosses. Darkened streets, Chinese tortures, that lackluster Christian spirit of age.
This is not real suffering and this is not a real poem.

Luminous, the gaslight oceantide shinsplinted reckless idle yawn.
Luminous, the Library of Congress system.
Luminous, the tidal moon ignored by man.
Luminous, the sea of coca-cola with aluminum ship, bail with coke bottles and spot land with coke-bottle glasses, scream Santa Claus goodnight as you wreck into cola-stalactite.
Luminous, hope that comes through a hundred and twenty-seven languages and speaks to no one.
Luminous, those you haven't met but cannot forget.
Luminous, the decadent decalogues, spinsters of beastly beauty and naturo-artifice.
Luminous, crows-feet beside eye of believing beholder of bullshit.
Luminous Loopy Lemioux.
Kingfish Culinary Cutlery.
The act of writing is the loosening up of muscle.
Sweep sweep the cobwebs of mind.
Why yes, you may sit here, but my writing may suffer.

2009-01-29T13:46:00.014+01:00

section of cendrars' moravagine

2009-01-29T01:15:00.004+01:00

ah hum. dealing with viruses and the stuff of burroughs' cut-up writings gets me in the mood for some good cendrars. figure i'd share a bit with you.

Diseases are. We do not make or unmake them at will. We are not their masters. They make us, they form us. They may even have created us. They belong to this state of activity which we call life. They may be its main activity. They are one of the many manifestations of universal matter. They may be the principal manifestation of that matter which we will never be able to study except through the phenomena of relationships and analogies. Diseases are a transitory, intermediary, future state of health. It may be that they are health itself.

...

Epidemics, and even more diseases of the will or collective neuroses, mark off the different epochs of human evolution, just as tellurian cataclysms mark the history of our planet. In all this lies an elementary, complicated chemistry which has not yet been studied.

Learned and all as they are, the doctors of today are not physicians. They are drifting farther and farther from the study and observation of nature. They have forgotten that science must remain a kind of edification which is subject to the limitations of our spiritual antennae.

CS

one of love's symptoms: an unsent letter

2009-01-28T04:49:00.007+01:00

Dear Emma,

The games I play are both necessary and inexcusable. They are necessary in the sense of understanding the possibilities in what people go through. Am I somewhere new? Has this been felt and experienced before?

I caught this bug. Perhaps I’ve always had it, and it just needed the right signals to trigger. Antagonism and attraction. Reality and fantasy. Truth and lies. When one chooses not to oppose these dualities in their mind but integrate them and let them spin off, it is a dangerous proposition. If I think, “I want to see you” and “I don’t want to see you” at once, both intensely, both so sure to disagree that these counter-desires scream at each other and make either choice unbearable, where does that place me?

What I am striving for is clarity and honesty. I want to understand your position and understand my own. I used to think a glance and a smile are enough but without the sense of affection they aren’t enough. Enough… Perhaps this bug is a desire that cannot be sated, cannot be ended with an ‘enough.’ At parties of old in France the ladies would place their gloves in their wine-glasses to indicate that they would not drink wine, but several adventurous women would not. They did not have enough. Dionysos did not have enough. Nor Napoleon, nor . . . Have you considered the consequences of a desire unbridled? I have considered. It is madness, destruction, a voracious lack . . . and yet clarity, creation, the excess of life itself. Aristotle was right to revere moderation. Moderation sustains. It keeps us even, it keeps us alive. We’re moderately happy, moderately sad. This interplay and struggle between excess and moderation, between letting go and holding tight, has weighed heavily on me for several days now. And it’s because of you.

It began with a conversation. It will also end there. An encounter is a circular thing. Not a thing, an event. An event of great importance to me though I do not remember what we talked about. What I remember is what was unsaid. One cannot speak a glance or a feeling. Every shared event afterward between us will be a continuation and repetition of that event. To speak of particulars would be to miss the point.

What I seek is clarity and honesty. I’ve said words and meant the opposite. I called you mad once and that is a mistake, for I am the one that is mad. I see myself not as a human being but an amalgamation of perceptions mentally formed into a cohesive whole. As I exist, events happen to me. They change my perceptions and they change me. An imperfect metaphor is a river, with tributaries as events. I, too, am a tributary, I am your tributary. Perceptions are like water, they flow and have a force of their own. But again, I’m me, you’re you, that should be enough . . . but I get carried off. Madness consists not in being carried off but choosing to be.

In short: be on my side and I’ll be on your side. Understand that much of what has happened between us has happened in our minds, but that it is no less real because of it. Know that the sun will rise tomorrow, and us with it. Know that I would not change a thing.

early to bed

2009-01-27T07:08:00.010+01:00

I went to find a morphine music video to post in the comments of the cell phone entry. instead of watching a morphine music video I ended up with donald duck's 'early to bed."

morphine were pioneers of low rock, a style known for its lack of guitar and emphasis on the sax and bass within a rock context. they're also a great band to dishwash to. instead, donald duck. you'll see below the video links for 'morphine tabs | morphine lyrics | morphine mp3.' not that i wasn't entertained by daffy's incapacity to go to sleep or his swallowing of a clock. or that he consequently himself ticks.

we have a cell phone

2009-01-25T13:35:00.002+01:00

we want it to be small, compact, able to be carried or put into a pocket easily

we want it to be droppable

we want it to store all the numbers of the people we cherish and admire

we want it to take beautiful photographs of our lives

and it holds up its end of the bargain

my question: what do we bring to the table?

on the journal, travel, plagiarism, burroughs, and the three steps.

2009-01-25T05:23:00.002+01:00

Since that notorious trial in Constantine, I have felt a strong literary urge coming to the fore. My gift for writing is really coming to life these days. I used to have to wait, sometimes for months, for the right moods to write in. Now, I can write more or less whenever I want. I think I have reached a point where the potential I had been aware of all along has now begun to blossom.
- Isabelle Eberhardt, The Nomad, p. 133

Journals and their purposes have been increasingly on my mind the past few months. I decided to take a class in the Fall focusing on the journaling practice and its consequences on artistic and thoughtful living. I read three works that had affinities and connections to journaling and approached them as a student, that which seeks knowledge and wisdom.

In late August I read Rory Stewart's The Places in Between. It detailed the author's walk across Afghanistan two months after the U.S. invasion in 2001. He walked across Asia, starting in the Middle East and ending in Nepal. He had to skip Afghanistan because the Taliban did not give him permission to cross. After the fall of the Taliban, Rory was given permission to walk across Afghanistan. He is a historian, humanitarian, and diplomat. His journey is detailed in a precise, chronological way, with each day of the hike receiving one or two chapters. On his way he is accompanied by two Iranian soldiers, befriends a dog, meets a prince, gets dysentery, and meets with numerous tribal leaders in the mountains of Afghanistan. His narrative's matter-of-factness and his clear eye in understanding social relations provides an informative and compelling vision of Afghan life. This book reminded me that a story is still one of the best ways to share an experience and moment. Video, sound recording, and photography can only do so much. It is through language that we connect to the world around us through communication.

I also read sections of Isabelle Eberhardt's The Nomad and William S. Burroughs' Last Words. These two books roughly speaking represent the beginning and end of a writer's life. At the time of the writings in The Nomad, Isabelle is twenty years old and ambitious. She wants to become a nomadic traveler, an Islamic mystic, and a prolific writer. A born Russian and later Frenchwoman and Algerian, Isabelle lead a very dynamic and chaotic life. Reading her journal entries immediately made me understand her humanity. She is full of self-doubt and is constantly in search of her higher being. She is very brave and capable, and is remarkably free-spirited. In order to be able to travel freely in the Islamic world, she had to dress and disguise herself as a man. She did not have the same moral basis as the society around her, yet through her faith and her inner convictions she became a person to admire and in some senses imitate.

"I must free myself to create an inner world of thoughts and feelings which will console me in my solitude and poverty, and in the absence of aesthetic pleasures, which are too much of a luxury in my position,"i and "I must also learn to live in the present moment. I must learn to feel more deeply, to see better, and above all, to think."ii She wrote these words when she was the same age I was, and I can relate to them a great deal. I included them in an assignment amongst selections of my own writing without citing her. This gave the 'illusion' that all the writing was mine.

Outside the context of a 'journal' this is plagiarism. Yet I have many objections to plagiarism. The concept of plagiarism is a relatively new phenomenon. Before the universality of libraries writers often took passages and pages from other writers. Herman Melville is a famous example.iii Second, I do not place much importance on the individual in the creation of a piece of art. Much more is going on than 'a writer sitting down and writing.' All sorts of ideas, events, ways of thinking and ideologies permeate any piece of writing. To become conscious of it and to play around with it, to 'see who writes through you' is a valuable exercise. Also I felt that footnoting or otherwise showing the origin of those quotes would detract from its aesthetic value. In a certain way I see footnotes and citations as crippling and encasing words into a certain framework. Of course, a straight word-for-word copying of another's work, or an artless stealing of ideas or material from a primary source should and is looked down upon. What I'm trying to say is that I thank you for allowing me the freedom to play around with my sources.

Reading Burroughs' Last Words was a bit depressing. At the time of writing Burroughs is in retirement from serious writing, and writes a journal in order to sate a decades-long habit of writing his dreams and ideas down. He writes his dreams down diligently, is very upset at a cat's death and is very fond of his cats, and writes often about the evils of the drug war. I felt my own sense of mortality creep up on me on reading these passages. Though much of the wit and charm from his novels comes through in his journal entries, I saw some of the idealistic lustre that Burroughs had in my mind slip away. I found that an easy way to unidealize someone is to read their journals. In journals we are human, more or less. In a novel or a piece of art, we transcend that, we create an illusion of ourselves as better than we are.

In a journaling context, the artist has three primary phases by which a piece of work is created. The first is input. This is life, each second in a day. Input can be a book, a movie, a song, a conversation, a leaf on the ground, anything. The second is recording, creating, writing and drawing and interacting. The third is the selective process. In examining journals we see more closely the first two steps in the process. There is more there, and only later through editing will the writer extract the necessary material to craft a complete and unified piece of art. This is why journals are often boring, disjointed, fragmentary, and mundane. Burroughs mentions in an interview that he wrote six hundred pages of Naked Lunch and only two hundred and fifty made it into the final product.

Burroughs also didn't keep a journal, per se, but saw all his writing as potentially included in a book. I admire this and will move in this direction. The more words I create that go toward a book the closer I get to one. I see my journaling process as moving in the direction of the mini-journal. Fictionalized and fragmentary accounts of life, blown up in a picaresque fashion to entertain and distort the reader's imagination.

In short, Stewart's book is an absolute gem and will be the model for any sort of ethnographic, historic, or socio-economic travels I may have. Eberhardt's struggles and ambitions made me realize I'm not alone despite my reluctance to desire what the mass culture I am a part of desires. I'm not alone in wanting to travel, to write, and to be a more complete and beautiful person. Burroughs taught me that the artist draws everything from life, and that the journaling process can be structured toward art. His vision of life and the world comes through much more clearly in his interviews and shows that an individual and unique conception of the world and how it works can be crafted and built, and is very very possible!

Bibliography:
Burroughs, William S., and Grauerholz, James, ed. Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs. New York: Grove Press, 2000.
Eberhardt, Isabelle and Kershaw, Elizabeth. The Nomad: The Diaries of Isabelle Eberhardt. Northampton: Interlink, 2003.
Hibbard, Allen. Conversations with William S. Burroughs. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999.
Stewart, Rory. The Places In Between. Orlando: Harcourt, 2006.

tobacco - hawker boat

2009-01-24T11:28:00.000+01:00

2009-01-22T09:23:00.002+01:00

http://www.theparisreview.org/viewinterview.php/prmMID/4260

The first question is one of the worst I've ever seen in an interview. Which makes it one of the best.

first book

2009-01-22T06:17:00.010+01:00

Chapter

He wrote in his journal on one of his dismal aimless afternoons in Portland. The coffee shop was his second choice, his first plumb full. The cafe was sterile, full of glowing apples and start-up fanfares. There were Portland Mercuries scattered about, one open at the next table to the horoscopes. The wind blew in the open door and no one save the barista spoke. He didn't fit in. He had no technology, no fixed gear, the patches on his coat were like a sky-blue suit at a formal dinner. He's from somewhere else, no one cares where. He might as well not have been there, and in a way he wasn’t, he was beside her, writing himself by her side in front of her wood stove, feeling her wool and tasting her tea and fruit. He read Celine to her, out loud, the father and the World Fair and the laughter shared between them.

11. Isabelle. I froth at the mouth. Her text stuns me. Kindnesses that go unchallenged. My sorrow shared by millions. Such an expert you are with your SIM cards and former heartbreaks. So ordinary, conservative cool, full of poise.

I figured you could love someone like tossing a coin, no preference for the outcome. A quiet pep talk, some time and you're okay again, deserving. I know that, all in all, things went according to plan. I couldn't afford yoru paranoia, your beautiful cruelty.

We would have figured each other out, same conversation, the boredom would set in, we couldn't withstand the Terror of our Revolutionary Love. I was your Robespierre; God was your Napoleon.

Chapter

He walks across leafy Portland State and remembers the day he walked out of class, seemingly forever. The day before he’d read about Buddhist monks and their annual reading of the Scriptures. How they would flip through a book, pfffffft, set it down, done. Just so many dead, immaterial words, nothing compared to the living thought, the immanent groundlessness of being. His professor had made a Hegelian claim to absolute knowledge, she had imposed her image of a dead writer to stimulate dead minds and he heard a voice inside say, “This is not for me,” and he stood up and left.

As he watched the wind-blown leaves dance around his feet he chanced to look up and notice the library, massive and teeming with books. Unconsciously he had arrived; saw he had an hour until close. He walked in, trying hard to shake the feeling of fatality from his mind.

CHAPTER

He wrote:

“To be discarded. To have the vital days of your life used and discarded by that which cares little for you. A stupid fate, but no less common because of it. Only we can love ourselves as much as we require, but it must be a selfish love, a harsh love.”

He heard, "There is an extra charge," and "I like pumpernickel."

There was a young man with a group of older women at the cafe. He was being flirtatious, courting them. "Look at this young man," they communicated silently to one another, "They don't make them like they used to."

It's obvious he would like to take one of the three women at his table home with him. "The walk-in in the kitchen here says 'Christopher Walk-in,'" He says, "I have to bring that home with me, that's hilarious." He speaks to them as if they were adult-sized children, paternally, this is what we're going to do now.

It is the lady in yellow and pink flowerprint, gray and hungry, that takes to him. He's turned slightly away from her, saying, "It's so bad, soooo bad," I couldn't hear what. He turns further and speaks to three other older women at the next table, joking about a free dozen donuts. His experience pales in comparison to theirs. 'Who gives a damn about donuts, you have your whole life ahead of you!' they scream silently. Yet healthy indignation sinks into apathy, the conversation rolls on, and for these girls the day slowly drifts by in the company of themselves.

13.

Ah, the Oregon Coast in October, tucked in a sleeping bag in a small tent beside the ocean. I heard its waves and felt endorphins flow through my body from the long bicycle ride. A rainy day of taking hills and watching the RVs go by. I thought to myself as I was at the bottom of every hill, 'I wonder what's over?' and I always replied, this in my head, 'More trees.' The height of cynicism is at the bottom of a hill with the cold rainy wind in your face (though under poncho I was a furnace) with knee ache, the tired feeling that doesn't go away with eating. Fatigue. It was around four in the afternoon when I would look to camp. You can throw a rock and hit a campsite all along the coast. I hadn’t planned at all, simply read a few books on touring, picked up my supplies and left. It seemed instantaneous that I had a goosedown warm light sleepingbag and personal tent, two panniers and a solid 10 speed. Suddenly I was free to do as I wished, for I was traveling.

The chaotic nature of the world, colored only by the flash of external sculpture representing the boundless authority. Its blackness humbles the quieter now murderous crowd though all is silent except for the blare of the cars. The sphere hums and vibrates metallic gray spectral patterns of fractals emerge from the depths of uncertainty as the future peers itself. Taoists reach a kind of satori, philosophs strand years, its just art for the raggle on this a thous. Fear blue flash of in and the overtake red recollects a moment. Arrest to run and the screaming continues, more pacified. With each handcuff, the blue and red, static, become solidified, Oregon, California, Idaho, Nevada. South Dakota. As sides are taken, as pragmatism holds solidified sway grids forming union recollects a moment when five state assailants are beaten, as he name piece placed plastic piece into its proper place on North America. He remembers her smile, she's dead nowompared to the screaming, needy children at the grocery store she used to work at and her other grandchildren, to her he was outerworldly, so like her son his father yet infused with new blood, reborn. It is on this sphere of gelatin and fractal imprecision that she inscribed the union patch of sand that the crowd now projects onto the sphere. He is easily bored, easily changed, and when he turns away to stare a barely perceptible blood red begin to tinge of dark green and seem cracks of a union.

20.

She reads,

“We are more than ever surrounded by ants,” says her letter. They push the dust uneasily at top speed. They take no interest in us.

Not one raises its head.

This is the most tightly closed society that could exist, although outdoors they spread out constantly in all directions. No matter, their projected schemes, their preoccupations . . . they are among themselves . . . everywhere.

And up to the present time not one has raised its head towards us. It would rather be crushed.

go game & links

2009-01-08T14:39:00.006+01:00

virb.com/codystahl

my arch-nemesis, lodewijk's plurk:
plurk.com/low

my new blog (old one above):
iwantlow.blogspot.com

my arch-nemesis, lodewijk's blog:
loweblog.com

Other blogs, plurks, and twitters:
califone http://rootcrownarts.blogspot.com/
shaq twitter.com/THE_REAL_SHAQ
cokemachineglow.com

If you are reading this blog and are a member of plurk.com, please send a polite message to Lodewijk to give me his user name, "low." He wrote two plurks: "Plurk sounds like something that comes out of your nose..." and "low thinks the whole Plurk idea suffers from FAIL."

Surely he does not appreciate plurk and is letting the user name that I want go to waste. Please send him a quick message at low@loweblog.com telling him that I, Cody Stahl, want to acquire plurk.com/low and the user name. I have already offered him a cookie in exchange but have so far been met with silence.

This email will not involve wiring a small amount of money to free my Nigerian relative from prison. Nor will you receive offers for viagra, vicodin, or allegra. I am not looking for a helpful emailer to accompany me on a luxury cruise in the caribbean. I am not asking for your vote and I will not be more likely to vote for you if you message Lodewijk on my behalf.

If it's any consolation, your small message could be considered your first truly altruistic act of the day.

- CS