usually i don't dress up for halloween, but i have the perfect costume for this year. i am going to be...
the last motherfucker on earth.
suggestions on what this costume might look like can go in the comment section. i appreciate any and all inspiration.
Sep 28, 2008
i'm an idiot.
i am emotionally immature.
i don't know what i want.
even if i did, i would be unable to get it, due to my own suckage.
doing things can be fun.
i love mikey's in moscow.
dogs in idaho are huge.
the new xkcd comic is my favorite thing.
i'm hungry.
tomorrow is work, which sucks because so was yesterday and today.
my mom sent me money and i feel weird about it.
i think i'm probably going to be alone forever.
that's a problem.
apparently my ex-girlfriends fucked me up more than i thought.
had i realized this eariler, i would have been meaner to them.
my hair is disgusting right now.
i may never sleep again.
i am emotionally immature.
i don't know what i want.
even if i did, i would be unable to get it, due to my own suckage.
doing things can be fun.
i love mikey's in moscow.
dogs in idaho are huge.
the new xkcd comic is my favorite thing.
i'm hungry.
tomorrow is work, which sucks because so was yesterday and today.
my mom sent me money and i feel weird about it.
i think i'm probably going to be alone forever.
that's a problem.
apparently my ex-girlfriends fucked me up more than i thought.
had i realized this eariler, i would have been meaner to them.
my hair is disgusting right now.
i may never sleep again.
somewhere along the line in the last few weeks, i forgot how to be alone. my huge apartment seems way too small, the moments of silence seem a lot louder than the hours of socializing. i've always clung to the idea that despite all my other random fuckups, my interactions with others were based mostly on my own desire to be helpful, to do good, to learn and heal and grow by sharing. now i don't know. i feel like i keep grabbing onto other people to keep myself from falling down. and sure, for all those other reasons too, but they suddenly aren't as important. i'm not sure if i can face the idea that i am basically, well, selfish. but it's probably true, even if i pretend it's not.
it's a problem that gets exacerbated the more time i spend with people i like. so what's the answer to that? avoiding people so you don't hurt them (and inevitably hurting yourself in the process) is such a cliche answer. but what the fuck else is there to do?
for awhile there, i was just happy in my little hidey-hole. because i had convinced myself that's the only choice i had, and so i adapted to it. now that it's not the only choice i have, and i can't keep pretending it is without pulling a major self-delusion, i've realized that i basically just don't have the emotional intelligence required to be around people in relationships that involve more than really shallow interaction.
i simultaneously feel like a) i make things into much bigger deals than they are and b) when i don't, life is really, really empty most of the time. no good way to reconcile those things.
it's a problem that gets exacerbated the more time i spend with people i like. so what's the answer to that? avoiding people so you don't hurt them (and inevitably hurting yourself in the process) is such a cliche answer. but what the fuck else is there to do?
for awhile there, i was just happy in my little hidey-hole. because i had convinced myself that's the only choice i had, and so i adapted to it. now that it's not the only choice i have, and i can't keep pretending it is without pulling a major self-delusion, i've realized that i basically just don't have the emotional intelligence required to be around people in relationships that involve more than really shallow interaction.
i simultaneously feel like a) i make things into much bigger deals than they are and b) when i don't, life is really, really empty most of the time. no good way to reconcile those things.
Sep 25, 2008
onomatopoeia'd!
the chorus to mason jennings' "soldier boy" (which you have a copy of if you downloaded last month's mixtape) goes something like this: "bang-a bang-a bang-a bang diggy diggy, bang-a bang-a bang-a bang willa willa" three times in a row. i really want to get that printed on a shirt, framed in such a way that implies it's a really profound philosophical statement.
sandwitchery
i just hit the sandwich shop to pick up something to eat while i am grading all evening, and i was waited on by this absolutely adorable and crazy-friendly girl who was obviously just a fairy or a white witch or something trying to pass herself off as a human. maybe she was a sylph. anyway, she wasn't sure at first if they could actually fill my order because they were short on ingredients. however, after checking the pantry (or whatever), she decided my sandwich was good to go.
when she actually made it and gave it to me though, she told me they were apparently out of croissants and so she's had to make the sandwich bigger and put it on a baguette-type roll. she informed of this in an extremely placating manner, as if she was sure i was going to fly into an insane rage at any moment. of course i didn't care. how could i? i was getting a bigger sandwich, and besides, i was under her weird white-witch spell.
maybe it's just because i'm hungry, but this is the biggest, fastest, shiniest, tastiest sandwich in the land. god, i want to fucking hug someone.FUCK.
when she actually made it and gave it to me though, she told me they were apparently out of croissants and so she's had to make the sandwich bigger and put it on a baguette-type roll. she informed of this in an extremely placating manner, as if she was sure i was going to fly into an insane rage at any moment. of course i didn't care. how could i? i was getting a bigger sandwich, and besides, i was under her weird white-witch spell.
maybe it's just because i'm hungry, but this is the biggest, fastest, shiniest, tastiest sandwich in the land. god, i want to fucking hug someone.FUCK.
an homage
i'd like to thank my friend who may or may not realize i'm talking about her for being cool and putting up with me calling her all the time for no particular reason by posting this picture.
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| From Other and Posts |
hours to go, till the plateau
the boys are playing their first show of the cardinology US/UK tour tonight in albany. there are lots of good reasons to be living in pullman right now, but shit, if i was still based in NE ohio, i would absolutely be there.
i'll be refreshing RAA madly all night for live setlist updates. good times.
i'll be refreshing RAA madly all night for live setlist updates. good times.
zero to creepy in 3.4 seconds
i love the conchords' ability to do this with a song. you think you know where it's going and then it gets weird. then it gets really weird.
evidence that nothing is funnier on a thursday afternoon than a bunch of white new zealanders rapping:
evidence that nothing is funnier on a thursday afternoon than a bunch of white new zealanders rapping:
the p-word
i was very amused today when, after i read a third or so of what was an exceptionally long impromptu blog response in class, my professor responded by saying "ben, you're so prolific" in a bemused sort of voice.
one of the things that is a unifying factor among most of my favorite artists and writers, etc. is that they are characterized as "prolific". this isn't widely considered a positive thing, especially in the music industry, which largely prizes polished product and reproduction of said product (well, it is an industry after all). but i respect an artist (on principle) who will write and record and release 50 songs a year, even if 25 or so of them aren't necessarily that great, more than i do for a band of guys who take five years to write and record 13 perfectly-crafted songs. there's just something great, inspiring, and rabid about artists who just can't stop working, and who are more concerned with the process than the product (again, not a very Western sentiment). it's just confusing to me to see that sort of drive be chided and mocked instead of supported and nurtured.
people are dirty and fucked up and they hurt each other and then they die and rot and turn into dirt. so what? get over it. people who can accept that and keep looking for the good anyway are deserve so much more respect than people who just cover up the parts they don't like, make the shiny parts shiner, and live like they're the ones driving. you're not driving. you're on the bus. what the fuck ever.
anyway, it was amusing that even in the environment of the class today i heard the word "prolific" as not entirely positive. but it made me happy nonetheless. it's definitely an appellation i can be proud of, even if it makes me more of a weirdo. i guess if i'm prolific i don't know how to be anything else, so i'm sort of stuck with it.
one of the things that is a unifying factor among most of my favorite artists and writers, etc. is that they are characterized as "prolific". this isn't widely considered a positive thing, especially in the music industry, which largely prizes polished product and reproduction of said product (well, it is an industry after all). but i respect an artist (on principle) who will write and record and release 50 songs a year, even if 25 or so of them aren't necessarily that great, more than i do for a band of guys who take five years to write and record 13 perfectly-crafted songs. there's just something great, inspiring, and rabid about artists who just can't stop working, and who are more concerned with the process than the product (again, not a very Western sentiment). it's just confusing to me to see that sort of drive be chided and mocked instead of supported and nurtured.
people are dirty and fucked up and they hurt each other and then they die and rot and turn into dirt. so what? get over it. people who can accept that and keep looking for the good anyway are deserve so much more respect than people who just cover up the parts they don't like, make the shiny parts shiner, and live like they're the ones driving. you're not driving. you're on the bus. what the fuck ever.
anyway, it was amusing that even in the environment of the class today i heard the word "prolific" as not entirely positive. but it made me happy nonetheless. it's definitely an appellation i can be proud of, even if it makes me more of a weirdo. i guess if i'm prolific i don't know how to be anything else, so i'm sort of stuck with it.
521 prompt #5, or "unfortunately my dreams are only like tripping on boring, boring acid."
In Christabel, there’s an interesting tension between things we see at night and things we see during the day. Christabel’s first reaction, after her night with Geraldine, is to brush it aside and deny the realities of her experience. Barcy’s night-time vision, by contrast, becomes the driving force of his character. Consider Coleridge’s exploration of the contrasting attitudes about the veracity of our dreams. Write about a particularly vivid dream you had. When you woke up, how did you react to that dream?
I thought this prompt would be especially interesting considering my somewhat troublesome relationship with sleeping. When I was really young, believe it or not, I actually slept too much. I had a tendency to sleep a lot at night and to still nod off during class (according to my parents, art class and fingerpainting especially had this effect on me). In fact, to hear them tell it, I constantly sort of stumbled around in this half-awake stupor, ready to sleep whenever the opportunity presented itself. Actually, that’s probably not much different than today, only then it was caused by an overabundance of sleep and now it’s caused by a lack of sleep.
On to dreams. I generally envy people who have the sort of dreams Barcy has. You know, the type you read about in books that are always vivid and clear and get turned into prophecy and metaphors for some universal truth. I wish I would have dreams like that. Well, unless I turned into the male equivalent of Cassandra. My hair is weird enough as it is without me tearing at it and screaming all the time.
I have a friend who has sleep paralysis and another who has lucid dreams. Hearing stories from them about their conditions always fascinates me. One of the main underlying causes (among other, weirder ones) of the insomnia I’ve had trouble with since I was about ten or twelve is that I always want to be doing something, writing something, working or thinking about something, and the idea that sleep could possibly reveal some meaningful or weighty experience is an alluring one for me. If I could have the kinds of vivid, realistic experiences these friends have in their dreams, I wonder if sleeping would be easier for me.
When I was younger (between the sleeping-too-much phase and the sleeping-too-little phase), I used to sleepwalk all the time. But I don’t remember it clearly at all. I would wake up to my parents telling me outlandish stories about how, the night before, I had come down to the living room in the middle of the night and had conversations with them, or made myself food to eat or something similar, but I wouldn’t remember it at all. I was also known during these episodes to speak in some bizarre tongue that only I (apparently) understood.
I also very occasionally have a very vivid, “real-life” type dream. Perhaps because of the rareness of these dreams, I tend to take them very seriously, in an almost mystical way. Usually if these kinds of dreams suggest some course of action to me, I’ll try to follow it in real life. I’m not exactly sure if that’s because I think the dreams are “true”, per se, or just because I like doing random things to make life interesting. Actually, I think it’s because when I have a “real” dream, it’s so real to me that sometimes I have a hard time even realizing it’s a dream. For example, when I was a kid I was obsessed with Super Nintendo (okay, and I still am). My favorite game at the time was Final Fantasy 2, and one night I had a vivid dream that I had gone downstairs to the living room and found the game on the coffee table, left as a gift by my parents. When I woke up, I hurried downstairs, feeling as if I had, in real life, just left the game there moments before. Of course it wasn’t there, but the dream had been so real I spent about three hours searching the house before I satisfied myself that the dream hadn’t actually happened. I’ve been known to this day to sometimes recall entire, detailed conversations to friends, or incidences I was involved in with them, thinking that these things actually occurred, only to be assured over and over again that I simply dreamed them.
This type of dream only happens to me maybe once or twice a year, though. I generally dream every night (or every other night), but my dreams are always just sounds, snatches of images, smells, blotches of color…sort of what you’d see if you could animate those drawings people did on LSD for those Army tests back in the 50s. A lot of the things I dream about are abstractly interesting, for sure, but as far as deriving real meaning from them? Doesn’t really happen.
I used to think people’s reactions to their dreams were dictated by their personality. One of my friends, who is a bit of a mystic, seems inclined through her personality to take things like dreams at face value as “messages for life”. My dad, who is a very pragmatic guy, would likely laugh this off as nonsense. But now I wonder if maybe the content of the dreams themselves are more to blame. I have a tendency to believe in fantastic things (if for no other reason than that they make life more interesting), but even I am leery of treating dreams as some kind of message from the astral plane. At the same time though, I have dreams that my brain inherently finds impossible to separate from waking reality. So that’s a bit of a problem.
I think there’s something inherent in nighttime, and the way in which it impedes vision (the sense, of course, that we put the most trust in) that makes us question our experiences and our perceptions. No matter how many lights we have, how many distractions, it only takes a few minutes in the middle of a dark forest at night to have us hearing and seeing things that aren’t there, and not hearing or seeing things that are. I honestly think that in terms of Christabel, Christabel knows full well what actually happened when she awakes in morning; she is just hoping that perhaps she is wrong, and that her experience with Geraldine might turn out to have been - or at least will be able to be explained away as - a figment of her imagination. For Barcy, who likely already has a bit of a bent towards the fantastic (as a bard), his dream gives him a purpose, gives his life a grand meaning…and who’s going to question that? It’s a good thing to have.
dressed for success. serial killer-type success...
as is often the case with my TV show obsessions, i find my fascination with dexter bleeding over into aspects of my life not directly related to sitting in front of the TV. for instance, i've started privileging the dexter morgan dress style on days that i don't have to teach. the weather lately is just about perfect for the long-sleeved but tighter-fitting three-button cotton shirt and a pair of mangy cargo-type pants or khaki not-slacks; it's warm enough when it's colder and ventilates well when it's hotter. and it's damn comfy when you're spending 12 hours straight in your office, or sleeping on your desk or in your clothes. or on your desk and in your clothes.
i've been such a jeans and button-shirt guy for the last year or two (even in summer) that it's a nice change.
i'm not sure while i'm blogging about this...
anyway, it's comfy. though it makes me want to break into somewhere (or at least sneak around) more than a little bit.
i've been such a jeans and button-shirt guy for the last year or two (even in summer) that it's a nice change.
i'm not sure while i'm blogging about this...
anyway, it's comfy. though it makes me want to break into somewhere (or at least sneak around) more than a little bit.
Sep 24, 2008
priorities
today, i have to (in order of importance):
1. work on the mix CD for september
2. remember how to care about someone else without going nuts
3. do the job i'm getting paid to do
4. figure out a way to feed myself on campus until midnight or so with no money
1. work on the mix CD for september
2. remember how to care about someone else without going nuts
3. do the job i'm getting paid to do
4. figure out a way to feed myself on campus until midnight or so with no money
Sep 23, 2008
plagiarism!
okay, it's not actually plagiarism. but. my friend mike posted this the other day as part of a larger comment and it was so beautifully labyrinthine and straightforward at the same time that i just had to share.
i assume this was in response to something i said that was intense and/or creepy. since pretty much everything i say not about food falls into one of those two categories (at least), i'm going to just let the actual content of the comment remain suspect:
"Good news! You've freaked me out and what do you know, I still care. The nature of relationships is to fight for the good, even if it's an unrealistic hope. Which I do not mean to suggest is the case here. Part of the problem of being melancholic is that it shelters one from getting over oneself. So get out there and let your dim light shine."
relationships really are about fighting for good, or at least for common ground. sometimes i feel like when i'm not at least keeping other people in mind, i lose the ability to do good completely. and how fucking true is the idea that melancholy is a shelter? handy for a little quick healing here and there, but stay at even the mayo clinic for too long and you'll get bedsores. sigh. being melancholic really is a selfish act, and since it seems to be anathema for so many people to be selfishly good to themselves (as opposed to selfishly bad)...wow. i'm so past the "misery is easy/happiness is embarassing" thing. it's nice to be able to finally say that after about ten years and not feel like i'm lying. on to new (hopefully better) things.
i assume this was in response to something i said that was intense and/or creepy. since pretty much everything i say not about food falls into one of those two categories (at least), i'm going to just let the actual content of the comment remain suspect:
"Good news! You've freaked me out and what do you know, I still care. The nature of relationships is to fight for the good, even if it's an unrealistic hope. Which I do not mean to suggest is the case here. Part of the problem of being melancholic is that it shelters one from getting over oneself. So get out there and let your dim light shine."
relationships really are about fighting for good, or at least for common ground. sometimes i feel like when i'm not at least keeping other people in mind, i lose the ability to do good completely. and how fucking true is the idea that melancholy is a shelter? handy for a little quick healing here and there, but stay at even the mayo clinic for too long and you'll get bedsores. sigh. being melancholic really is a selfish act, and since it seems to be anathema for so many people to be selfishly good to themselves (as opposed to selfishly bad)...wow. i'm so past the "misery is easy/happiness is embarassing" thing. it's nice to be able to finally say that after about ten years and not feel like i'm lying. on to new (hopefully better) things.
i can haz twittur?
i had to sign up for twitter for a class project in 595. so if anyone's on, or you've been waiting for some other tool to sign up so you can sign up and look like less of a tool besides said tool...i'm your tool.
who knows? maybe it'll be cool.
we're supposed to set them up for our cellphones too. since i generally only get text messages that are fairly urgent information, i can't wait to constantly get vibed all week and whip out my phone while experiencing that "oh shit, what did i forget?!" stomach-dropping feeling, only to find out that the dude from down the hall just used the bathroom without wiping his hands.
who knows? maybe it'll be cool.
we're supposed to set them up for our cellphones too. since i generally only get text messages that are fairly urgent information, i can't wait to constantly get vibed all week and whip out my phone while experiencing that "oh shit, what did i forget?!" stomach-dropping feeling, only to find out that the dude from down the hall just used the bathroom without wiping his hands.
presents or absinthe?
we were talking during my presentation in 595 today about presence and absence, and for some reason that's what i kept hearing. which leads to me believe that i subconsciously want it to be christmas. so i can get drunk.
things have been insane, as you may have gathered. i managed to get a decent night's sleep a few nights in a row (which doesn't mean as much as you think it might mean when you're working 14 hours a day), but then last night the dreaded dr. insomnia struck again and i didn't fall asleep until 430, to wake up to the alarm at 7. to face my dreaded tuesday of back-to-back-to-back obligations from 830am until 9pm, including an hour-long presentation. caffeine stopped helping at around 1pm (you know, that state where you realize it's actually starting to make you stupider), so then i had to resort to nicotine. which worked. but then there's that whole "cancer" thing.
anyway, i got through the presentation okay. my hair is still ridiculous. there's a camera in the WHETS class that points down from the ceiling and constantly makes me puzzle over whether the thinning-hair area on the top of my head is in fact larger than it was when i was 14 or the same size.
seriously. i have really thin, annoying hair. and it's looked like i'm losing my hair since i was about 13-14. but it doesn't seem to get any worse, ever. i suppose i can live with that. no, i can definitely live with that. considering the alternative.
it's amazing how things get swept under the rug when you're working too much. i've been realizing things all week like "i haven't checked my mail in six days!" because i literally think about it every time i walk past the mailbox, but i'm so concerned with being time-efficient that i just think "nah, i'll do when i'm not so busy". but then i never am.
i've been trying to deal with a personal matter lately involving girls and feelings and today had an opportunity to do so. but i was just so tired and frustrated with trying to keep up with all my work obligations that i just flat-out didn't care enough. i'm so worn out that the idea of being in a relationship with someone that cares about me just makes me think "well then when the fuck am i going to have time to cook dinner?"
sad tuesday.
i think work's getting the best of me. and at the same time, i've been sitting in my office now for 45 minutes after class let out because i'm afraid to go home. because it's quiet and there's nothing to do. i'm too tired to work anymore tonight (brain's fried) but i'm afraid to go home because i don't want to have another claustrophobia/nervousness/weirdness attack.
yeah, okay, obviously nobody should date me, even if i manage to talk them into it. i can't even take care of myself.
things have been insane, as you may have gathered. i managed to get a decent night's sleep a few nights in a row (which doesn't mean as much as you think it might mean when you're working 14 hours a day), but then last night the dreaded dr. insomnia struck again and i didn't fall asleep until 430, to wake up to the alarm at 7. to face my dreaded tuesday of back-to-back-to-back obligations from 830am until 9pm, including an hour-long presentation. caffeine stopped helping at around 1pm (you know, that state where you realize it's actually starting to make you stupider), so then i had to resort to nicotine. which worked. but then there's that whole "cancer" thing.
anyway, i got through the presentation okay. my hair is still ridiculous. there's a camera in the WHETS class that points down from the ceiling and constantly makes me puzzle over whether the thinning-hair area on the top of my head is in fact larger than it was when i was 14 or the same size.
seriously. i have really thin, annoying hair. and it's looked like i'm losing my hair since i was about 13-14. but it doesn't seem to get any worse, ever. i suppose i can live with that. no, i can definitely live with that. considering the alternative.
it's amazing how things get swept under the rug when you're working too much. i've been realizing things all week like "i haven't checked my mail in six days!" because i literally think about it every time i walk past the mailbox, but i'm so concerned with being time-efficient that i just think "nah, i'll do when i'm not so busy". but then i never am.
i've been trying to deal with a personal matter lately involving girls and feelings and today had an opportunity to do so. but i was just so tired and frustrated with trying to keep up with all my work obligations that i just flat-out didn't care enough. i'm so worn out that the idea of being in a relationship with someone that cares about me just makes me think "well then when the fuck am i going to have time to cook dinner?"
sad tuesday.
i think work's getting the best of me. and at the same time, i've been sitting in my office now for 45 minutes after class let out because i'm afraid to go home. because it's quiet and there's nothing to do. i'm too tired to work anymore tonight (brain's fried) but i'm afraid to go home because i don't want to have another claustrophobia/nervousness/weirdness attack.
yeah, okay, obviously nobody should date me, even if i manage to talk them into it. i can't even take care of myself.
holy SHIT.
xkcd.com just made a populous reference.
i already knew i loved that webcomic, but it just vaulted itself up to My Favorite Thing Ever. or at least it stands shoulder to shoulder with pizza.
i already knew i loved that webcomic, but it just vaulted itself up to My Favorite Thing Ever. or at least it stands shoulder to shoulder with pizza.
other people's interesting words part eleventeen
i really liked this RA quote i just ran across. reminds me why i'm pretty convinced that making a conscious effort to keep people from dating me is sort of doing the public at large a service:
"The excesses of romance make sense to me. Like, I can meet someone and immiedately vibe with them and feel love and feel close enough to care, and I can be very protective and overzealous about it. Then sometimes I'll reflect onto myself while I'm doing these things, and I'll realize I'm at my shit worst. Like, heart on chain, dragging through the mud with ice cream cone and sand behind me. I actually love things so much it kills me. It drives me absolutely mad, and I can't find a place to get jaded. I mean, I've had a succession of romantic downfalls in my life, and yet I don't ever find the jaded part. I don't think, I'm just gonna wait around and see if things will be okay, and maybe this'll all pan out, and maybe the truth will come to me in a week. I never accept that, it has to be immediate. I won't accept less, and if I can't have the immediacy then I invent the myth of why it isn't there. I said the other day to a friend, 'Well, fuck, I wouldn't date me, man. I'd definitely go out for a drink with me, but there's no way in hell I'd date me.' The only real full-time people in this world, it seems to me, are people of faith, like a preacher or a saint, a criminal or an artist, because 24 hours a day, those people are always on to something. We're so busy being in love with the world that we can't help but recreate it and keep trying to turn it into our own truth."
RA on john mayer:
"[John Mayer] doesn't cuss. I ran into him at Virgin Megastore, and he was nice. I was like, 'Aw, man, I've been talking so much shit about you.' And he said, 'Man, I figured that.' And I was like, 'You're a really nice guy, but you don't drink or smoke, so you're making me look bad.' We had adjoining rooms at a radio convention, and he came over and asked me to put out my cigarette. I think I closed the door in his face. Then Elton John called and goes, 'Be nice to John Mayer. He's afraid of you.'"
RA on conor oberst:
"I'm supposed to be this big party guy, but [Conor Oberst] called me at 6 or 7 P.M., when I was planning to go to his gig at 9 or something, and he's like, 'Dude, let's meet for drinks.' And I'm like, 'Conor, it isn't even dark yet.' He's like, 'Man, I want to talk to the crazy Ryan.' And I said, 'Crazy Ryan is on holiday, because Crazy Ryan tried to kill Regular Ryan.' You know, Conor made me feel old!"
"The excesses of romance make sense to me. Like, I can meet someone and immiedately vibe with them and feel love and feel close enough to care, and I can be very protective and overzealous about it. Then sometimes I'll reflect onto myself while I'm doing these things, and I'll realize I'm at my shit worst. Like, heart on chain, dragging through the mud with ice cream cone and sand behind me. I actually love things so much it kills me. It drives me absolutely mad, and I can't find a place to get jaded. I mean, I've had a succession of romantic downfalls in my life, and yet I don't ever find the jaded part. I don't think, I'm just gonna wait around and see if things will be okay, and maybe this'll all pan out, and maybe the truth will come to me in a week. I never accept that, it has to be immediate. I won't accept less, and if I can't have the immediacy then I invent the myth of why it isn't there. I said the other day to a friend, 'Well, fuck, I wouldn't date me, man. I'd definitely go out for a drink with me, but there's no way in hell I'd date me.' The only real full-time people in this world, it seems to me, are people of faith, like a preacher or a saint, a criminal or an artist, because 24 hours a day, those people are always on to something. We're so busy being in love with the world that we can't help but recreate it and keep trying to turn it into our own truth."
RA on john mayer:
"[John Mayer] doesn't cuss. I ran into him at Virgin Megastore, and he was nice. I was like, 'Aw, man, I've been talking so much shit about you.' And he said, 'Man, I figured that.' And I was like, 'You're a really nice guy, but you don't drink or smoke, so you're making me look bad.' We had adjoining rooms at a radio convention, and he came over and asked me to put out my cigarette. I think I closed the door in his face. Then Elton John called and goes, 'Be nice to John Mayer. He's afraid of you.'"
RA on conor oberst:
"I'm supposed to be this big party guy, but [Conor Oberst] called me at 6 or 7 P.M., when I was planning to go to his gig at 9 or something, and he's like, 'Dude, let's meet for drinks.' And I'm like, 'Conor, it isn't even dark yet.' He's like, 'Man, I want to talk to the crazy Ryan.' And I said, 'Crazy Ryan is on holiday, because Crazy Ryan tried to kill Regular Ryan.' You know, Conor made me feel old!"
Sep 22, 2008
my hair is ridiculous today
how is today different than any other day, you wonder? well, i'm glad you asked.
first of all, amelie is back on the AV club, dissing the emmys. which i can appreciate even though i don't have cable. mostly because i hate TV.
secondly, i was just listening to "always see your face" by love, and i realized for the first time ever that during the break in the middle of the song, not only is the drum part sung, it's also sung solely in the left channel while the guitar solo is solely in the right channel. how fucking cool is that? seriously.
first of all, amelie is back on the AV club, dissing the emmys. which i can appreciate even though i don't have cable. mostly because i hate TV.
secondly, i was just listening to "always see your face" by love, and i realized for the first time ever that during the break in the middle of the song, not only is the drum part sung, it's also sung solely in the left channel while the guitar solo is solely in the right channel. how fucking cool is that? seriously.
Sep 20, 2008
i'm sorry, conor
about this time last spring, i apologized profusely for groundlessly hating on john mayer's music, because he had just released the terribly engaging and catchy and even slightly emotional continuum. i still pretty much despise his back catalogue, but this album and everything i've heard since then has impressed me.
i feel the same way after hearing conor oberst, the latest release by the eponymous dude and his band of other dudes. i have tried and tried again to get into bright eyes' previous releases, but i just can't. it's too whiny and too self-righteous even for me, his voice strained unnecessarily for dramatic whiny-ass effect. i liked cassadaga a lot, but the four winds ep seemed to swerve again into genre expectation territory. i had hoped, though, after hearing cassadaga, that his next album would go further in the direction that album suggested: conor using his painfully obvious skill with words and melody to construct something that drew on the mythic north and central american folk background he was clearly interested in and didn't spend as much time on just making him and everyone else fucking miserable. conor oberst is that record, and i'm really happy he made it. i'm really happy to admit that i was wrong, because this record is awesome. he may never make another one like it, but this is the kind of record that i will defend to anyone as vehemently as i'll defend my dislike of his previous records.
here's one of the best songs i've heard in quite some time, the first off the record.
it's the only copy of the studio version i could find on youtube; sorry that it sounds like someone actually (for whatever reason) recorded it from a CD player or iPod directly into their computer rather than just, say, downloading the mp3 or something...
i feel the same way after hearing conor oberst, the latest release by the eponymous dude and his band of other dudes. i have tried and tried again to get into bright eyes' previous releases, but i just can't. it's too whiny and too self-righteous even for me, his voice strained unnecessarily for dramatic whiny-ass effect. i liked cassadaga a lot, but the four winds ep seemed to swerve again into genre expectation territory. i had hoped, though, after hearing cassadaga, that his next album would go further in the direction that album suggested: conor using his painfully obvious skill with words and melody to construct something that drew on the mythic north and central american folk background he was clearly interested in and didn't spend as much time on just making him and everyone else fucking miserable. conor oberst is that record, and i'm really happy he made it. i'm really happy to admit that i was wrong, because this record is awesome. he may never make another one like it, but this is the kind of record that i will defend to anyone as vehemently as i'll defend my dislike of his previous records.
here's one of the best songs i've heard in quite some time, the first off the record.
it's the only copy of the studio version i could find on youtube; sorry that it sounds like someone actually (for whatever reason) recorded it from a CD player or iPod directly into their computer rather than just, say, downloading the mp3 or something...
521 prompt #4, or “Not California”
For someone who has spent a decent amount of his grad school career critically examining the mythologization of the American West, I have to admit that ironically (and a bit shamefully) I bought into this very myth as a child and young adult. In fact, had I not, I wouldn’t be where I am today.
I grew up in northeast Ohio, in a disorienting, alienating patchwork of post-industrial wastelands, the bones of old strip malls, and the shiny, squeaky-clean illusion of suburban cul-de-sac communities. As is often the case, I experienced the side-effects of growing up in such a place before I was old enough to understand or critically examine the cause(s) of those effects. When it came time to choose a college for my undergraduate work, I was excited to get out, to move on. I didn’t yet know why I was excited. I was having the existential equivalent of the reaction of a bear caught in a bear trap: I didn’t know what had ahold of me or why. I just wanted to get away.
I had two main options. One was to attend the uber-liberal semi-erudite College of Wooster, which was somewhat outside my price range but which had an excellent program in English Literature and Creative Writing (two of my major possibilities at the time). The other was to attend the slate-grey urban sterility of Case Western Reserve in Cleveland, Ohio. I was leaning at the time towards majoring in Computer Science and Case had one of the better local programs. Somehow, instead, I ended up enrolling at Kent State University. Forty-five minutes away from my hometown, it was still a geographic, demographic, and existential revolution for me. Partway into my first semester, the activities I engaged in in my spare time (of which there was admittedly little) had already changed from sitting at my computer playing video games to hiking in metroparks, going on road trips, attending free piano concerts at the music hall, reading things like Nietzsche just for fun, and riding my bike around town (as opposed to walking). It was a life-changing experience already, and I still had four and a half years to go.
After those four and a half years, and then two more years of working random blue-collar jobs to pay my rent, Kent hadn’t so much lost its charm as it and I had simply reached the limits of what our relationship could be. There wasn’t anything new for me there, and I’ve never been one to be content with simply being content.
Throughout my college career, spending time with a group of friends who enjoyed travel, I had cultivated a desire to “see the world”; of course, at that point in my life, anything beyond the borders of the US was - either financially or logistically - beyond my reach. So, as so many Americans did before and likely have done since, I turned to myth of the West. I decided I wanted to go to California. Partially for the sake of the trip itself, partially for the experience of living somewhere new, but mostly because of the culturally-produced idea that somehow, by traveling to the west coast one could be cleansed, transformed, allowed to have a second chance to find meaning in a world that seemed willing to sell it to you, but never willing to share it freely.
Because of my obligations to my studies (complicated thorougly by the fact that I changed my major to English late in my third year of classes), I wasn’t able to take off to California right away (though a few of my friends did). For years I kept the dream in the back of my mind, the one thing I truly wanted to do, once I had dealt with all of my responsibilities and was free to be reborn.
That chance came two years after my graduation when I received a TA offer from WSU. It was a school I knew nothing about in a place I knew nothing about. I was settled at the time in Kent, Ohio, with a TA offer to do Ph.D work at Kent State. I was renting a nice house. I had a fiancee who was living right down the street. My family was less than an hour drive away. But in spite of all of those things, I saw my chance to try the dream, and I knew that if I didn’t take that chance, whether it worked out or not, that I would regret it for the rest of my life. I wouldn’t recommend making a major life choice based on fear of potential self-loathing, but in this instance it was the best way for me to make the decision. I left for Pullman a few months later.
I still remember clearly arriving here on the first day. My disappointment in seeing the green forests of western Idaho fall away to present the desert-dry hills of the rolling Palouse. My realization that this, whatever it actually was, was not California. It wasn’t the dreamland of redwoods and acoustic guitars and sudden, inexplicable rebirth that I had imagined for all of those years. It was different than Ohio, sure, but if I was going to recreate myself I was definitely going to have to work for it.
So I did. And in so doing I acheived what I had hoped I would acheive simply by going to California - self re-definition, etc. - but I did so in a much less magical and much more engaged and rewarding way. What I found instead of a blank spot on the map to start my life over from was a town where everyone smiles and says hello, where you can drive an hour in any direction and find some of the most beautiful landscape in the country, and where I was forced to, for the first time, make my way completely on my own, completely away from anyone who would feel obligated emotionally, professionally, or financially to help me. And I think that was the experience that was mythologized into a much simpler, less intimidating version of itself.
theory of the arts, or “how i learned to stop hating that cliche phrase about loving the bomb and…no, that’s not true, i haven’t stopped hating it."
“With Blake, we’re presented with a dense theory of art and its relationship to the human creative vision. And Blake, for his part, seemed to create art with theory in mind. But can art grow legitimately out of theory, or must art be named and organized after its creation? Can we set out to create an art of vision?”
I’m not sure of the best way to attack this prompt, but there was something that drew me to it (aside from it being the shortest of the four). I suppose it’s because I consider myself an artist in a few senses, and so the question of what makes a legitimate foundation for the creation of art is something that’s on my mind fairly often.
I’ll ramble a bit here on my own thoughts before moving on to Blake.
I think that art comes from the personal experience/worldview/belief system/etc. of the artist who creates it. There is a common belief (at least in our current culture) about the supposed mysticism of artistic creation - an idea that art somehow springs into the world, fully formed, in a magical moment of sheer inspiration and brilliance. I think this makes the idea of applying theory, or indeed perhaps any structure at all, to the creative process distasteful to some and as much as inconceivable to others. Does the belief that this distaste is based on stand up to scrutiny, though? Not at all in my experience.
Whether it’s writing a seminar paper, doing a sketch, taking and editing photos, writing a poem, a story, a song, or a novel, I have never (with one or two notable exceptions) had the “sprung fully-formed” experience when attempting to create art in my life, and I have had variants on this conversation with other people of an artistic bent enough times that I can say there are at least twenty artists whose experience in creating echoes mine and zero (that I know of) who would contradict my claim. Art doesn’t magically happen. Songwriters don’t just create songs out of thin air. Well, unless they just inhale massive amounts of marijuana or cocaine and then strum on a guitar and sing or beat on a guitar and scream (respectively) until something vaguely coherent emerges. But I digress.
Art is work. It’s work based on what you’ve seen, smelled, felt, tasted, heard, loved, hated, dreamt, buried throughout your life. Whether you invoke this consciously or not while creating, I believe this is where the creating comes from. I know I’m taking a bit of wide view of the word “theory” in this regard - not everyone will deconstruct the entire history of poetry/art and its motivations before sitting down to write a poem - but I believe that at the heart of both Blake’s desire to base his poetry on theory and the generic artist’s desire to base his/her creation on his/her own filtered and interpreteted experience is the same larger aim: to give both some kind of form and an essential uniqueness to some level of what’s being created.
In Tuesday’s presentation, the thing that certainly caught my attention the most (other than making the awesome Blake plates) was Jim’s comment regarding Blake’s idea of how to reconcile desire/innocence within a world of law (ideally in such a way that doesn’t involve volcanoes and/or people blowing up): Blake suggests that one channel one’s desire into Work (with the implication being that the highest form of work is, of course, the creation of art). I like this idea a lot because of the way that it immediately characterizes artistic creation as work, the same as one might consider being a bank teller of a composition instructor to be work.
I think it may be possible to say that without this ability to conceive of artistic creation as work (versus, say, seeing it as frolicking under an oak tree with a chapbook until your Muse smacks you upside the head and you wake up with something publishable) and also without the desire to incorporate one’s own theories, experiences, etc. about life into their art, that there can’t be art. It isn’t the pretty words or the nice music that makes something art; it’s the person or people and the lives behind that creation, and if there isn’t any of that behind a creation, it’s going to fall pretty flat.
I just now thought of how, for the last few weeks and especially during orientation, a very popular piece of advice for incoming grad students was that they should write about and study what it is that they’re interested in, and not necessarily what seems the most professionally viable. So there seems to be an undercurrent of support for this idea (whether it’s conscious support or not) of generating your own hierarchy of what’s important, of what’s interesting, and using that to fuel your writing. So maybe creating with a theory in mind isn’t that outlandish of an idea after all.
a fistful of homemade citrus cleaner
so i left work at 5 yesterday. a very liberating feeling. i guess that's what not being a workholic and obsessive feels like. i can't say i could really get used to it (after being home for an hour i started to feel intensely bored and worthless), but it's nice once in awhile.
i spent the evening cleaning and getting my household affairs in order. i've got shitloads of reading to do this weekend, but i was just so worn out yesterday (i was nodding off in spanish 600 at like 330pm) that i figured getting all the cleaning out of the way would be better than forcing myself to swallow theory all night long. now that i have twelve entire hours (and a few weird dreams) worth of sleep under my belt, i'm off to tackle the theory part. if i can beat the rain to my office, that is.
anyway, the apartment is about as clean as it could possibly be (except for the shower, which i failed to get to before i ran out of calories/got entranced by House). i've had a few unannounced visitors in the last week, and i'd have felt a bit better about that if my place hadn't been a total mess (i doubt that they cared, honestly, but it's the principle of the thing).
listening to kicking television again. my first impression stands. it's an excellent recording; great mix of audience noise and band sound, you can hear pretty much all the instruments well at all times (a crazy accomplishment with wilco)...but the performance itself, while technically good, is just sort of tired-sounding. they're reproducing awesomeness instead of creating it, like at the spokane show or any of the board recordings i've gotten from bt.etree.org. it's a good album, but i'd much rather it had been taken from the current or 2007 tours. there's just a lot more energy behind them. oh, and "impossible germany" and nels cline are also behind them, and that doesn't hurt either.
i spent the evening cleaning and getting my household affairs in order. i've got shitloads of reading to do this weekend, but i was just so worn out yesterday (i was nodding off in spanish 600 at like 330pm) that i figured getting all the cleaning out of the way would be better than forcing myself to swallow theory all night long. now that i have twelve entire hours (and a few weird dreams) worth of sleep under my belt, i'm off to tackle the theory part. if i can beat the rain to my office, that is.
anyway, the apartment is about as clean as it could possibly be (except for the shower, which i failed to get to before i ran out of calories/got entranced by House). i've had a few unannounced visitors in the last week, and i'd have felt a bit better about that if my place hadn't been a total mess (i doubt that they cared, honestly, but it's the principle of the thing).
listening to kicking television again. my first impression stands. it's an excellent recording; great mix of audience noise and band sound, you can hear pretty much all the instruments well at all times (a crazy accomplishment with wilco)...but the performance itself, while technically good, is just sort of tired-sounding. they're reproducing awesomeness instead of creating it, like at the spokane show or any of the board recordings i've gotten from bt.etree.org. it's a good album, but i'd much rather it had been taken from the current or 2007 tours. there's just a lot more energy behind them. oh, and "impossible germany" and nels cline are also behind them, and that doesn't hurt either.
Sep 19, 2008
bottom of the barrel
with the vending machine empty of all varieties of caffeinated beverage today, and with me not really having the time or the money to go elsewhere for my fix, i've been forced to disgrace myself in ways i never thought i was capable of, just to keep my body functioning.
for some reason, i couldn't fall asleep until 5am last night, and then i had to get up at 7am. this was after getting home "early" and getting into bed at midnight. but it just didn't happen. so as you can probably imagine, having class until 5pm today means my caffeine need is great. unfortunately, there is none to be found. so i've been scraping together random piles of change all day and downing cans of barq's root beer, which a) tastes like shit b) doesn't even have any caffeine in it, just a metric assload of sugar c) tastes like shit d) tastes a lot like disgusting shit.
i feel like a junkie who suddenly finds himself naked in a closet in the dark, trying to smoke a banana peel.
the root beer has kept me functioning thus far (and also given me a horrible aftertaste in my mouth), but i'm out of change now. just a little over two more hours, then i'm taking the rest of the night "off" to do laundry, buy groceries and clean my apartment. coming back in the morning to start on my presentation in earnest. god be with us all.
for some reason, i couldn't fall asleep until 5am last night, and then i had to get up at 7am. this was after getting home "early" and getting into bed at midnight. but it just didn't happen. so as you can probably imagine, having class until 5pm today means my caffeine need is great. unfortunately, there is none to be found. so i've been scraping together random piles of change all day and downing cans of barq's root beer, which a) tastes like shit b) doesn't even have any caffeine in it, just a metric assload of sugar c) tastes like shit d) tastes a lot like disgusting shit.
i feel like a junkie who suddenly finds himself naked in a closet in the dark, trying to smoke a banana peel.
the root beer has kept me functioning thus far (and also given me a horrible aftertaste in my mouth), but i'm out of change now. just a little over two more hours, then i'm taking the rest of the night "off" to do laundry, buy groceries and clean my apartment. coming back in the morning to start on my presentation in earnest. god be with us all.
there's always someone cooler than you
i made a voltron joke in class today and nobody got it. i'm old.
fucking voltron, man! people don't know voltron? are you serious?
there's no caffeine left in the vending machine. it's a weird day today.
lots of lofty, high-and-mighty things going on in my head, but i have to do a bunch of mundane things like clean my apartment and buy groceries and such.
i wrote a rock song, like a real rock song with stupid love-song lyrics and reverb and crunch and shit. it was fun. i almost wore a tie to work today just for the fuck of it.
i'm afraid of the weekend. i can't wait to sleep, but the prospect of having to sit in avery and put this presentation together bothers me. i'm worried about having to do my own thing all weekend...i've been spoiled lately by getting to hang out a lot with awesome people.
it's like candy. as long as i don't interact with anyone or care about anybody, it's easy to get used to being alone. but as soon as i get invested in something, it's hard to cope with a lot of alone time.
a lot of things that have happened lately. a lot of things that have made clear to me exactly how socially fucked up i am. it makes it a bit terrifying to reach out to new people, knowing that at some point i'll disappoint them, or freak them out, or piss them off. but i guess that's the way the world works.
right?
fucking voltron, man! people don't know voltron? are you serious?
there's no caffeine left in the vending machine. it's a weird day today.
lots of lofty, high-and-mighty things going on in my head, but i have to do a bunch of mundane things like clean my apartment and buy groceries and such.
i wrote a rock song, like a real rock song with stupid love-song lyrics and reverb and crunch and shit. it was fun. i almost wore a tie to work today just for the fuck of it.
i'm afraid of the weekend. i can't wait to sleep, but the prospect of having to sit in avery and put this presentation together bothers me. i'm worried about having to do my own thing all weekend...i've been spoiled lately by getting to hang out a lot with awesome people.
it's like candy. as long as i don't interact with anyone or care about anybody, it's easy to get used to being alone. but as soon as i get invested in something, it's hard to cope with a lot of alone time.
a lot of things that have happened lately. a lot of things that have made clear to me exactly how socially fucked up i am. it makes it a bit terrifying to reach out to new people, knowing that at some point i'll disappoint them, or freak them out, or piss them off. but i guess that's the way the world works.
right?
Sep 18, 2008
fall has sprung!
Sep 16, 2008
my wish would be for me to say intelligent things
but i think that's beyond me right now. which sucks, seeing as how i have almost 8 hours worth of class today, spread out over a 12-hour period.
someone i was chatting with mentioned yesterday that i have a very positive outlook on love. that might be true, but the downside to that (there's always a downside) is that i become very emotionally invested in possible relationships. even if i'm too much of a coward to express interest to the other party.
someone i was chatting with mentioned yesterday that i have a very positive outlook on love. that might be true, but the downside to that (there's always a downside) is that i become very emotionally invested in possible relationships. even if i'm too much of a coward to express interest to the other party.
i spent most of the weekend at moro because of construction on avery hall. i was holed up in the corner (the corner opposite my usual corner) about twelve hours a day, working on a piece for (hopeful) publication instead of doing all of the reading i should have been doing. i tried working all that in last night, but my brain gave out and i ended up chatting online with a few people until odd hours of the night. it's amazing to me sometimes how long my brain will chase its own tail. even in the face of apocalyptic levels of sleep deprivation.
i met a homeless guy out on the patio sunday night, while i was taking a smoke break. we chatted for a bit, i tried to explain to him that having a Master's degree doesn't really get you a teaching job if you want to teach college, he tried to explain to me that being homeless makes it hard for you to keep track of your kids. it was getting cold (it was 9pm or so) and i pointed him in the direction of a few abandoned train cars i was pretty sure had some old blankets in them. i guess urban exploration is good for something. apparently he had just come over from seattle. talk about your unfathomable decisions.
i didn't bring enough food or money for food today. i can already tell it's going to be one of those days where, in addition to being half-awake and emotionally nonfunctional all day long, i'll be nursing that constant sort of gnawing sensation that says not only "you're hungry" but "you haven't been eating enough pretty constantly for a very long time". i hate that feeling. i'm failing, on some basic level, to keep myself at a healthy level of...something.
the weekend was really fun. okay, well saturday and sunday were mostly work, but i enjoy writing and so working on the piece was pretty fun. besides, it was nice to have an excuse to stay off campus. to hang out at moro, and sort of feel like it was early august all over again. like life made at least some semblance of sense. friday was excellent. made myself stop working at 5pm and spent the evening and eventually late night with a few friends. i would definitely do that again this weekend, but with papers coming in and a presentation coming up next tuesday, not to mention the fact that my life is starting to show those signs of fraying at the edges (filthy apartment, not many clean clothes in the dresser, dirty dishes piling up in the sink). i think it's going to be a putting-my-life-back-together weekend. and those are never fun.
maybe i'll get some sleep tonight.
i met a homeless guy out on the patio sunday night, while i was taking a smoke break. we chatted for a bit, i tried to explain to him that having a Master's degree doesn't really get you a teaching job if you want to teach college, he tried to explain to me that being homeless makes it hard for you to keep track of your kids. it was getting cold (it was 9pm or so) and i pointed him in the direction of a few abandoned train cars i was pretty sure had some old blankets in them. i guess urban exploration is good for something. apparently he had just come over from seattle. talk about your unfathomable decisions.
i didn't bring enough food or money for food today. i can already tell it's going to be one of those days where, in addition to being half-awake and emotionally nonfunctional all day long, i'll be nursing that constant sort of gnawing sensation that says not only "you're hungry" but "you haven't been eating enough pretty constantly for a very long time". i hate that feeling. i'm failing, on some basic level, to keep myself at a healthy level of...something.
the weekend was really fun. okay, well saturday and sunday were mostly work, but i enjoy writing and so working on the piece was pretty fun. besides, it was nice to have an excuse to stay off campus. to hang out at moro, and sort of feel like it was early august all over again. like life made at least some semblance of sense. friday was excellent. made myself stop working at 5pm and spent the evening and eventually late night with a few friends. i would definitely do that again this weekend, but with papers coming in and a presentation coming up next tuesday, not to mention the fact that my life is starting to show those signs of fraying at the edges (filthy apartment, not many clean clothes in the dresser, dirty dishes piling up in the sink). i think it's going to be a putting-my-life-back-together weekend. and those are never fun.
maybe i'll get some sleep tonight.
Sep 13, 2008
dog years
(for Bloomsbury):
I hate to copy off of tony, but apparently we have more in common than making Lord of the Rings jokes while backpacking…
My dog was my best friend when I was growing up. Maybe that sounds a little sad, or a little strange, but as a kid with years of experience with depression and social anxiety, I couldn’t have had a better friend. Your dog doesn’t judge you, she just looks at you with big, liquid brown eyes that say “Yes, you might sometimes be a fuck-up, but I forgive you if you just scratch behind my ears”. In this way, dogs are more honest and less hypocritical than most people; that’s why they make good friends, I think.
My dog, Chewby (named by my brother when he was four or five), was a fluffball - half minature collie, half chow chow - she basically had all the poofiness of a chow but the face of a collie. If I had a digital picture, I’d post it. actually, I might be able to pull one off my old 8mm videos at my apartment…if I can, i’ll put it up later.
I forget how old I was when we got her, but she died in 2003 and I think she was about twelve years old, so that would mean I was about ten when my parents brougt her home…which seems about right.
I don’t remember her coming home for the first time, but I definitely remember her leaving twelve years later. She had had a thyroid problem for years, her metabolism was completely shot, and my mom had been shaving her fur every few weeks for years because she simply couldn’t vent her body heat correctly anymore. She was miserable for a very long time and so eventually my parents made the decision to put her to sleep. I had been living fifty miles away, at college, for the previous four years, but I came home often enough to be somewhat familiar with the situation. I had known the decision was coming eventually, but I didn’t have the reaction I’d expected: the furious denial of reality everyone goes through on crime dramas on TV.
I drove home as fast as I could after getting the call, and as soon after seeing her, any doubt about putting her to sleep was put to rest. She looked terrible; much worse that I could ever remember her looking, and though the endpoint of her health problems wasn’t definite, I immediately felt bad for ever thinking that I could have wished such misery on her just for the selfish reason of having her around for another year or two.
I remember going to the vet, half-consumed with trying to keep my mom occupied on anything other than what we were about to do, and half-consumed with thinking about how Chewby herself was the only one who didn’t know what was about to happen to her. It was an odd thing to dwell on, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I wished that there was some way we could have made her understand. Not out of guilt, or anything, but just out of fairness, equity.
All the way to the vet, I sat in the folded-down backseat in my parents’ truck with Chewby, and when we got there the two of them went ahead to “check in”; I wouldn’t actually be going into the office with them (because there simply wasn’t room for four people in the office where the procedure was going to be performed), so it suddenly hit me as the car doors slammed that this was the last time I’d ever see my dog. I don’t remember much. I just remember crying a lot, I remember telling her that I loved her (and simultaneously feeling sad and awkward about this…who says “I love you” to a dog?), and I remember the look in her tired eyes…the look that said she knew something was wrong. It was a look I’d grown accustomed to recognizing. After all we’d been through together, she could recognize my sorrow as easily as she could recognize the word “cookie” or the rattle of the dog food bag. The moment was over far too soon, I cleaned myself up respectably enough (it’s not really permitted to show emotion in our family) before my parents came back to the car, and then I sat in the middle of the parking lot for what was probably about 30 minutes before they came out again, of course by this time completely composed after just watching a member of our family die in front of them (and I was as well; I don’t mean that as an indictment). Then we drove off. It was hardly ever spoken of again between us. I wasn’t told that she was being buried in my grandparents’ backyard until after it happened (purposefully or not, I don’t know).
I did the best thing I could think of to deal with it. I went to a meeting about the publishing of a local zine run by my then-girlfriend, sat through the entire thing like a zombie, and then had a completely melodramatic breakdown in front of her after everyone else had left. She was an absolute fucking sweetheart, and dealt with it okay. Then I, too, began to not think much about it.
Throughout the entire time Chewby was alive, though, I thought regularly about how much I cared about a dog (compared to how much I cared about most people) and how odd that seemed, logically. I could account for a bit of it at least by assuming that I had become attached as a child - children often develop really intense emotional bonds with strange animals/things/etc. when they’re growing up. That only partially explained it, though.
A lot of people view childhood as idyllic, and mine certainly had its idyllic moments. But there were enough staged “idyllic” moments, enough “smile and pretend” moments, that I eventually began to distrust the real ones as well. I can pretty honestly say that I didn’t experience much in the way of actual, healthy happiness until about age seventeen or eighteen. Most of the time before that, happiness was just a temporary cure, a way to avoid unhappiness.
What I wanted was some honesty, and there’s nothing more honest than a dog. Even cats have agendas, but dogs? Unlikely.
When the dog was “bad”, which she often was, she’d get locked in the basement. When I was bad, I’d get sent to my room, but I’d go to the basement instead. I used to talk to my dog for hours, trying to sort out my problems…in a way I suppose any of you who read my blog or who have been on the receiving end of one of my six-hour conversing sessions have these experiences to thank. I learned through these times to sit down and figure out my problems, to face them, to find a way to not feel bad for the simple fact that there was something “wrong” with me as opposed to letting them get out of control and grow. Without that skill, I can say without a trace of irony or melodrama that I probably wouldn’t be here today.
For a variety of reasons, at least some almost certainly my fault, I never felt I could talk to my parents. My dad was usually too busy paying the bills to have time for anything else, and my mom was too busy loving her children and being the keeping our lives “perfect” to deal with anything that couldn’t easily be fixed by food, money, or something else pulled from the ether.
So, once again for a lot of reasons, I never found talking to them productive. It actually usually seemed like I ended up scaring them a little when I tried. So I stopped trying. I could sometimes talk to my brother, but a five-year age gap makes a much bigger difference in experience when you’re fifteen than it does when you’re twenty-seven, and so there was only so much we had in common. I didn’t have much in the way of friends, largely through my own faults, and the friends I did have were more interested largely in playing wiffle ball when we were ten (I thought too much, even as a kid) and in avoiding their problems through drug and alcohol use when we were older. There were two or three people I’m sure I could have talked to, in retrospect, but I was pretty convinced that I was “crazy”, and I didn’t honestly want to let anyone other than the dog in on the secret, because she couldn’t judge and she couldn’t tell.
By the time my parents started having marital problems, thus ensuring that the two people who would have ideally been the most helpful at assisting me were already busy taking potshots at each other instead, it was a pretty regular occurence for me to spend a few hours here and there feeling sorry for myself, telling my problems to my dog, and petting her until I was done crying. It was good. It helped. I can’t help but think now that the relationship was a little one-sided.
It was strange, though, feeling not only as much or more love for a dog than I did for people…not to mention more trust. Again, this was admittedly partly because of my own hangups, but that doesn’t change how I felt.
Maybe pets cause these sorts of responses because they are non-judgmental, because the behaviors we are allowed to act out around them are from a much wider range than those we are around all but the most understanding and forgiving people. Maybe the love we feel for them stems not from the fact that they are capable of sharing our experiences and vice versa - hard to manage with something that doesn’t talk - but from the fact that they are capable of taking us as we are…something that we often have a lot of trouble even doing ourselves.
While my instinctual reaction to this post was to feel awkward for admitting these feelings and experiences, I really don’t think that’s reasonable. I had a friend who helped me navigate the troubled waters of growing up in a less-than-perfect incarnation of the American Dream. She helped me to make sense of my own depression and tendency to distrust people. At that time, there wasn’t a person alive who could have done that. And so the fact that she wasn’t a person shouldn’t change things at all.
the eliminator
i am straight trippin'
over a yawning abyss
resembling the throat and rotten teeth
of some guy
who doesn't take hygiene very seriously
the view is
well
not the best
and i sort of wish those eagles from the lord of the rings would
come and grab me from the precipice at the last
minute
so i don't fall in
and get digested by a large man
but i don't believe in fairy tales
unless i also believe in the bad, horrible ones too
and i believe in luck
but i believe that waiting around for it to strike is cruel
and i really wish i had a goddamn tomato in my fridge
because i want to make salsa or clam chowder
or whatever the fuck would taste the most like
opening christmas presents
i just skydived a little
and in the morning i'm going to
dust myself off
wash the blood out of my eyes
reset my broken legs
and get back to walking up the mountain i just jumped off of
because that's what you do
or you don't do anything
gute nacht
over a yawning abyss
resembling the throat and rotten teeth
of some guy
who doesn't take hygiene very seriously
the view is
well
not the best
and i sort of wish those eagles from the lord of the rings would
come and grab me from the precipice at the last
minute
so i don't fall in
and get digested by a large man
but i don't believe in fairy tales
unless i also believe in the bad, horrible ones too
and i believe in luck
but i believe that waiting around for it to strike is cruel
and i really wish i had a goddamn tomato in my fridge
because i want to make salsa or clam chowder
or whatever the fuck would taste the most like
opening christmas presents
i just skydived a little
and in the morning i'm going to
dust myself off
wash the blood out of my eyes
reset my broken legs
and get back to walking up the mountain i just jumped off of
because that's what you do
or you don't do anything
gute nacht
Sep 12, 2008
skipping my first bloomsbury post...
(for Bloomsbury):
…and this is of course not mean as an insult to the prompt-giver, but I don’t have a TV, I didn’t watch or read about pretty much anything regarding the Olympics, and thusly though I have definite opinions about them, those opinions, were I to express them, would be very ill-informed and probably just end making me sound like an angry ass.
So I’m going to avoid that outcome altogether and just not weigh in on this post. I will, however, knock out Tony’s either tonight or tomorrow evening.
Sep 11, 2008
this week has been brought to you by...
...the kind men and women at Neurotico-Ulcerous-Nail-Biting Worrytron and Clingerton Emotional Insecurity Technologies. and the letter 7.
food for food
only as a ph.d student in literature would i have an item on my daily to-do list that reads "think about applications of internet surveillance through the lens of those foucault readings".
at some point today i have to allocate time and calories to thinking about a specific thing. not writing or taking notes or reading, but just thinking. i need a dry erase board in my office. i tend to draw really convoluted, football-play-looking diagrams when i'm thinking about philosophical concepts.
at some point today i have to allocate time and calories to thinking about a specific thing. not writing or taking notes or reading, but just thinking. i need a dry erase board in my office. i tend to draw really convoluted, football-play-looking diagrams when i'm thinking about philosophical concepts.
Sep 10, 2008
aggravation
dear indie rock world,
why was bon iver on conan the other night playing the same song he's been playing on TV, the internet, and college radio since his album came out in february?
i only ask because, you know, that was seven months ago. and it's not as if there hasn't been any other good, interesting music out since then, or that, you know, bon iver could maybe play a different song or maybe write more songs or something.
once again, i dig the guy and i think what he does is pretty alright. but the horse is starting to decompose and all the beating isn't making the process any less messy.
why was bon iver on conan the other night playing the same song he's been playing on TV, the internet, and college radio since his album came out in february?
i only ask because, you know, that was seven months ago. and it's not as if there hasn't been any other good, interesting music out since then, or that, you know, bon iver could maybe play a different song or maybe write more songs or something.
once again, i dig the guy and i think what he does is pretty alright. but the horse is starting to decompose and all the beating isn't making the process any less messy.
why you should love "blonde on blonde"...or die.
i'm growing fonder and fonder of the AV club (ironically as i also grow less and less fond of the onion). i thought this was a pretty damn good article on the relevancy of dylan's music (and by extension other non-contemporary artists who tend to get poo-poo'd by otherwise discerning and tasteful music fans because it's "their parents' music".
Sep 9, 2008
if only there were handy metaphors in popular culture to explain confusion about relationships!
but there aren't.
seriously. in the last few years i've finally made peace with just about everything i used to be so incredibly insecure and unsure about: my physical appearance, my social anxiety, my ability as a teacher, my ability as a student, my own self-worth, my ability as a musician, as a singer, as a writer, as an artist.
i'm not confident in any of these things 100 percent of the time, but i'm confident in them enough of the time that i'm confident that i'm as confident as a normal person. ahem. "normal". person.
not so when it comes to dating. the main problem i ultimately have when trying to ask someone out, i've realized, after about ten days of worrying about it, is that i honestly cannot conceive of a situation in which any particular girl would be interested in me. i always end up in bad relationships because once a girl expresses interest in me, i immediately jump into dating because it's such a shock to me i want to take advantage of it. obviously this is stupid, and i realize that, and i'm not going to do it anymore. but that doesn't solve my basic problem: i'm convinced i'm completely unvaluable as a romantic partner. i'm not saying this in a whiny way, i'm not fishing for compliments. i'm just stating a fact. everytime i think about asking a girl out on a date, i literally cannot cannot imagine a situation in which she would say yes. so i just never ask. huh.
seriously. in the last few years i've finally made peace with just about everything i used to be so incredibly insecure and unsure about: my physical appearance, my social anxiety, my ability as a teacher, my ability as a student, my own self-worth, my ability as a musician, as a singer, as a writer, as an artist.
i'm not confident in any of these things 100 percent of the time, but i'm confident in them enough of the time that i'm confident that i'm as confident as a normal person. ahem. "normal". person.
not so when it comes to dating. the main problem i ultimately have when trying to ask someone out, i've realized, after about ten days of worrying about it, is that i honestly cannot conceive of a situation in which any particular girl would be interested in me. i always end up in bad relationships because once a girl expresses interest in me, i immediately jump into dating because it's such a shock to me i want to take advantage of it. obviously this is stupid, and i realize that, and i'm not going to do it anymore. but that doesn't solve my basic problem: i'm convinced i'm completely unvaluable as a romantic partner. i'm not saying this in a whiny way, i'm not fishing for compliments. i'm just stating a fact. everytime i think about asking a girl out on a date, i literally cannot cannot imagine a situation in which she would say yes. so i just never ask. huh.
the world cannot count.
so how is it that when i buy a pack of gum, which ostensibly has an even number of pieces in it (according to the box and my eyes) and then eat 2 pieces every time i chew gum...i only have one piece left at the end? the same thing has been happening with my tortillas. i buy a pack that has "eight tortillas" in it, eat 4 meals of 2 burritos each, and invariably either have 1 or 3 tortillas left after that.
gotta skate and stuff.
gotta skate and stuff.
judy turns it up to 10
just grabbed the new RA 10-23-2006 soundboard. i haven't listened to all of it yet, but it looks to be (as one of the final shows in the fabled '06 UK tour) a logical endpoint for all of the absolutely insane jamming and bizarre improvisation that characterized what was probably my favorite tour by any band, ever.
for one, the first set is 20 songs, all run together, without as much as a pause to change guitars. for another, there are at least 4 songs on the setlist that had never been played before and never got played again. why haven't i listened to this yet? because avery hall owns my soul and i have to ask it to be allowed to go out alone at night.
anyway, one of my favorite, flat-out fun rock songs that emerged during this tour was "judy garland", and i've pretty obsessively (surprise!) collected every version ever recorded...and this one is way better than any of those previous ones. notice, for example, the quick seconds-long disco beat breaks that the band lays down during the chorus; something they don't do normally during this song, but just saw fit to throw out there during this performance. it's details like that that make these guys special.
you can stream the song (or download) here.
for one, the first set is 20 songs, all run together, without as much as a pause to change guitars. for another, there are at least 4 songs on the setlist that had never been played before and never got played again. why haven't i listened to this yet? because avery hall owns my soul and i have to ask it to be allowed to go out alone at night.
anyway, one of my favorite, flat-out fun rock songs that emerged during this tour was "judy garland", and i've pretty obsessively (surprise!) collected every version ever recorded...and this one is way better than any of those previous ones. notice, for example, the quick seconds-long disco beat breaks that the band lays down during the chorus; something they don't do normally during this song, but just saw fit to throw out there during this performance. it's details like that that make these guys special.
you can stream the song (or download) here.
some blakean thoughts for tuesday
blake is kind of growing on me a bit. the love of nature, the whole "perception is reality" thing, the violent, sudden changes in his system of belief based on no logical or explicable evidence...he's my kinda guy. a little too emo, perhaps, but we all have flaws.
my new officemate jim gave a presentation today in 521 about blake and part of it was centered around blake's dichotomizing of law/desire and innocence/experience...or maybe more correctly innocence and desire/experience and law. basically the idea is that (as i understand it) law suppresses desire, which creates conflict, because desire needs to be expressed and in a law-centric life conflict is then the only real way to get that desire out into the open (unless, i suppose, if you just want to be super-repressed and go slowly insane or just be apathetic about everything). so blake posits that the way to express desire in a world of law is through work. he means most especially artistic work, of course, but i like taking the bigger meaning of the word work to just mean anything you do to give your life meaning in a larger context beyond yourself (i have a feeling blake wouldn't mind me appropriating his definition).
jim also included a good summing-up quote from everybody's favorite, frye: "all such work operates in the world of experience: it takes account of law and of our waking ideas of reality. work takes the energy which is wasted in war or thwarted in dreams and sets it free to act in experience".
my new officemate jim gave a presentation today in 521 about blake and part of it was centered around blake's dichotomizing of law/desire and innocence/experience...or maybe more correctly innocence and desire/experience and law. basically the idea is that (as i understand it) law suppresses desire, which creates conflict, because desire needs to be expressed and in a law-centric life conflict is then the only real way to get that desire out into the open (unless, i suppose, if you just want to be super-repressed and go slowly insane or just be apathetic about everything). so blake posits that the way to express desire in a world of law is through work. he means most especially artistic work, of course, but i like taking the bigger meaning of the word work to just mean anything you do to give your life meaning in a larger context beyond yourself (i have a feeling blake wouldn't mind me appropriating his definition).
jim also included a good summing-up quote from everybody's favorite, frye: "all such work operates in the world of experience: it takes account of law and of our waking ideas of reality. work takes the energy which is wasted in war or thwarted in dreams and sets it free to act in experience".
i just discovered npr podcasts
actually, i generally just discovered podcasts (yeah, you would have thought i'd have picked those up in like 2001, right?), and specifically just discovered the NPR "all songs considered" podcast. which has like 20 episodes i'm downloading right this second. because they sound awesome. and it's free. i'm in love with NPR.
if you're havin' girl problems...
...i don't feel bad for you son, i got 99 problems and a bitch is all of them.
i have a committee!
i have a real-life dissertation committee. it's nice to be on top of things for once. that just goes to show what a crippling addiction to caffeine and a growing reliance on american spirits can get you.
it's the american dream!
okay, i'm being a little sarcastic. except for the committee part. that's very cool.
it's the american dream!
okay, i'm being a little sarcastic. except for the committee part. that's very cool.
Sep 8, 2008
what you choose to do with your bulldozer
talking can terraform, can flatten some tangled
topography of the mind into
flat verdance - you can see what's coming miles
away; nothing jumps out, nobody screams
and even at night the shadows stretch
under the moon but you can see the tips of them.
not always, though. it's all about what you choose to do with your bulldozer ~
the edge of the shore, water running into
and up and over pebbles pulling them back and
forth with that interminable but gentle grasp
fireflies at the edges of the scene, at the edges of my fingers
fighting off cold
darkness
indefinition
all at once
giving form to everything while also being cowed by it
the stars are cold
hard
bright
enough of the sky that you almost feel like you can grab them
but you wouldn't want to
even the utmost beauty - perhaps especially
seems perilous to touch out here
i stretch out on the rocks
a million peas with a mattress hidden underneath
instead of the other way around
the view of the sky from this angle is obstructed by the spidery fingers
of a birch tree leaning out over the beach
from the closest green spot to the fringe
the edge
the fire's light is almost invisible
but i can see the smoke skirling around the tips of my toes
immensity is always humbling, the
question is, really, what your response to the humbling is
it's your only choice
i choose to see meaning, to believe there's meaning above and beyond me
whether this is true or not, it doesn't matter it keeps me from getting too carried away with
controlling
i don't understand why people want to be on top, to win
it signifies an end to something, a stoppage of learning
a narrowing of possibilities
even worse a lot of the time it also signifies or requires
destruction
fear
not knowing together is better than knowing alone
it keep some of us from going crazy (maybe)...
it gives a purpose to...um...some of us who aren't satisfied
with repetition
and winning socially-accepted accolades
(most especially money, but other things)
as an end to the means of life
if you're interested in everything you never have to worry about being bored
of course, it also takes a lot of work
which most people aren't into, and i guess i never understood that idea
if you're constantly into doing as little as possible, you shouldn't be surprised if your life
turns out to be a little less full than you might have wanted
it seems like a very straightforward karmic kind of thing
but so many people seem surprised when it happens
i guess that's partly why i always try to be busy with something
even just in my own head - there's just no time not to be
that's why it's good to be stretched out on the beach
in the middle of nowhere
in a place where some essential, elemental meaning
communicates itself to you whether you're looking for it or not
for one, you don't have to sift through layers of abstraction
and expectation to find it
it's just right there
~
the moon's loud enough that it's night
but not night enough to sleep
the riverbed, long since abandoned by anything that could have given it
that name
lies
dappling the moonlight into a thousand shades
rose, for love (?)
pearl, for age
silver, for time
blue, for the sky
which is still blue even when it's too dark to tell
topography of the mind into
flat verdance - you can see what's coming miles
away; nothing jumps out, nobody screams
and even at night the shadows stretch
under the moon but you can see the tips of them.
not always, though. it's all about what you choose to do with your bulldozer ~
the edge of the shore, water running into
and up and over pebbles pulling them back and
forth with that interminable but gentle grasp
fireflies at the edges of the scene, at the edges of my fingers
fighting off cold
darkness
indefinition
all at once
giving form to everything while also being cowed by it
the stars are cold
hard
bright
enough of the sky that you almost feel like you can grab them
but you wouldn't want to
even the utmost beauty - perhaps especially
seems perilous to touch out here
i stretch out on the rocks
a million peas with a mattress hidden underneath
instead of the other way around
the view of the sky from this angle is obstructed by the spidery fingers
of a birch tree leaning out over the beach
from the closest green spot to the fringe
the edge
the fire's light is almost invisible
but i can see the smoke skirling around the tips of my toes
immensity is always humbling, the
question is, really, what your response to the humbling is
it's your only choice
i choose to see meaning, to believe there's meaning above and beyond me
whether this is true or not, it doesn't matter it keeps me from getting too carried away with
controlling
i don't understand why people want to be on top, to win
it signifies an end to something, a stoppage of learning
a narrowing of possibilities
even worse a lot of the time it also signifies or requires
destruction
fear
not knowing together is better than knowing alone
it keep some of us from going crazy (maybe)...
it gives a purpose to...um...some of us who aren't satisfied
with repetition
and winning socially-accepted accolades
(most especially money, but other things)
as an end to the means of life
if you're interested in everything you never have to worry about being bored
of course, it also takes a lot of work
which most people aren't into, and i guess i never understood that idea
if you're constantly into doing as little as possible, you shouldn't be surprised if your life
turns out to be a little less full than you might have wanted
it seems like a very straightforward karmic kind of thing
but so many people seem surprised when it happens
i guess that's partly why i always try to be busy with something
even just in my own head - there's just no time not to be
that's why it's good to be stretched out on the beach
in the middle of nowhere
in a place where some essential, elemental meaning
communicates itself to you whether you're looking for it or not
for one, you don't have to sift through layers of abstraction
and expectation to find it
it's just right there
~
the moon's loud enough that it's night
but not night enough to sleep
the riverbed, long since abandoned by anything that could have given it
that name
lies
dappling the moonlight into a thousand shades
rose, for love (?)
pearl, for age
silver, for time
blue, for the sky
which is still blue even when it's too dark to tell
Sep 7, 2008
days like a train
and the night-sleeping part is just that skinny little metal coupling that keeps all the train cars from flying off in different directions. keeps them all heading down the track in line in some wacky illusion that reinforces the stupid idea that there really is just one way to go; you just have to find it.
not a fan of that idea so much.
man, i am so fucking tired. part of it's my own fault though. i should deal with that. like right the fuck now.
happy trails.
not a fan of that idea so much.
man, i am so fucking tired. part of it's my own fault though. i should deal with that. like right the fuck now.
happy trails.
 |
| From fall 08 |
Sep 5, 2008
completely distracted from anything to do with safety
that was a quote from a voicemail i got from mike eariler, but it describes how i've felt lately. like 85 percent awesome and 15 percent totally bottomed-out, but either way just absolutely unconcerned with long-term consequences. for once. there are a few chances for me to make a major ass of myself in the near future, and i'm definitely going to take them. stay tuned for the fallout.
get out from under the hindenburg...
oh, the huge manatee?
i wish i had something cool to say. i think i might survive this grad school thing after all. i don't want to get ahead of myself...i'm not even to the metal-rocking stage yet.
what is this blog post about?
hmm...i miss flowers and am looking forward to snow. and backpacking. and getting out of here occasionally. but also to working on shit that i actually care about. to actually caring about other people who don't just turn out to be like love-drains. w00t. i'm becoming less scared each day...and thusly more likely to do something insane. but that's cool. that's my thing. banking on other people's understand is scary, but when your only other choice is a life lived in fear of doing your thing...why the fuck are you here?
something more coherent later, hopefully.
get out from under the hindenburg...
oh, the huge manatee?
i wish i had something cool to say. i think i might survive this grad school thing after all. i don't want to get ahead of myself...i'm not even to the metal-rocking stage yet.
what is this blog post about?
hmm...i miss flowers and am looking forward to snow. and backpacking. and getting out of here occasionally. but also to working on shit that i actually care about. to actually caring about other people who don't just turn out to be like love-drains. w00t. i'm becoming less scared each day...and thusly more likely to do something insane. but that's cool. that's my thing. banking on other people's understand is scary, but when your only other choice is a life lived in fear of doing your thing...why the fuck are you here?
something more coherent later, hopefully.
 |
| From fall 08 |
Sep 4, 2008
521 prompt #2, or "'Kubla Khan' Would Be Cooler With Robots"
I’d like to focus on looking at Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” and Shelley’s “Ode To The West Wind” as examples of texts that fit Lawrence Buell’s description of “environmental texts”.
I was originally drawn to these two works specifically out of all of last week’s readings simply because they seemed to me to share a common theme in their acknowledgement of the circularity of natural processes. Now, Buell’s framework gives me a chance to see if they have a more detailed relationship.
Buell’s first requirement seems to be met by both poems. I’ve always at least halfway believed that within the torrent of beautiful imagery that is “Kubla Khan”, there’s a little bit of colonization going on. Maybe I’m just a pessmist or have started to go insane from grad school and now see colonization everywhere, but there’s always been a contrast for me between the natural world in the poem and the pleasure-dome that is incorporated by its builder fluidly - though not seamlessly - into that natural world. Even Coleridge’s desire to recreate the pleasure-dome shows, for me, a desire to put words to something that is essentially beyond words. It’s a desire I myself have had many a time as well, and I can understand it, but it’s still an attempt to quantify and/or enclose the unquantifiable. Maybe that’s the message meant by Coleridge’s inclusion of human history into natural history: a constant desire to explicate or control, even if the desire is simply to be able to celebrate nature…but there’s also an acknowledgment that such things are maybe a bit beyond our abilities.
In Shelley’s “Ode…”, human history is perhaps portrayed as slightly less aggressively. It is nature and nature alone, Shelley seems to be saying, that is capable of inspiring us to greatness. We are reliant on it, and he acknowledges this without any pretense of conquering, claiming, or building. Instead, he just begs nature to give him a hand.
Similarly, Buell’s second requirement is closely related to the first, but perhaps different enough to warrant a few more words. Human interest, even more significantly than not being “the only dominant interest” in both works, is displayed as secondary and subordinate to the interests of nature. Interestingly, human nature is also shown to be seemingly frustrated by this subordination.
The third requirement is the tricky one for me to draw a connection to, honestly. But I’ll try anyway. For all of Shelley’s and Coleridge’s insistence upon humanity’s subordination to the natural world, they seem to not be directly interested in implying our responsiblity towards the natural world. My guess is that this is because to them the natural world is so awesome, so powerful, that the idea of wringing your hands over whether you remembered to recycle your newspaper or not would seem silly, perhaps, in the mindset of these poems. That doesn’t mean that in the time between the writing of these poems and today, a time in which we have arguably developed technologies and lifestyles that are environmentally impactful enough to alter the natural processes that Shelley and Coleridge foreground in their poems, things haven’t changed. I think the lack of a direct ethical imperative in these poems is more a function of the time that Coleridge and Shelley lived in than anything else.
The fourth requirement on Buell’s list is actually the one, like I mentioned earlier, that caused me to choose these two poems in the first place. I think one of the absolute most fundamental points of both of these poems is the interest in nature as a cycle. In “Ode…”, the first three of the five stanzas, before Shelley goes off on urging nature to provide inspiration/sustenance/etc., speak clearly of the west wind, the “destroyer and preserver”, as the harbinger of autumn, the indicator that nature’s wheel has once again begun to turn from birth to death.
“Kubla Khan”’s relationship to nature-as-cycle is more based on imagery alone and is a little less obvious, but I think the connection can be seen by comparing the pseudo-sexual (and therefore spring/birth/etc. related) imagery seen through the poem with the mentions of the caves of ice and the “deep romantic chasm”, which is described as “a savage place” from which, actually, the life-giving fountain springs.
I think, taking into account the fact that in the ensuing years nature has become less awe-inspiring to a lot of us based on the fact that we can now “control” it, and therefore the idea also that we are responsible for its well-being has also grown, that both Shelley and Coleridge’s poems fit Buell’s requirements.
Sep 3, 2008
"first post from chrome" or "you shook my brain casing all day long"
chrome is pretty cool. i like the concept, i like the execution (aesthetically)...but it's pretty obviously a beta and i've already singlehandedly discovered like 3-4 glaring operational flaws.
i totally brutalized my students with expositional information today for 45 minutes. i felt a bit bad about this. i'm still learning how to cope with only have 50 minutes for a class again, too, so i planned too little and they got out way early. shit. and there's so much to do. i've felt like shit pretty much since my quasi-breakdown yesterday (maybe more on that later), so i guess maybe that was a good thing about getting done early, even though i felt i was being disingenuous. all nice talk and no substance. i can't wait to actually get into the material and feel like we're covering something. then maybe i'll feel like my life has a purpose again. yeah, that's normal...
anyway, i have a massive-ass headache and some lingering scraps of madness from last night, both of which are MURDEROUSLY EXACERBATED BY THE FACT THAT THE CONSTRUCTION WORKERS OUTSIDE ARE LITERALLY JACKHAMMERING INTO THE FOUNDATION OF THE BUILDING AND HAVE BEEN FOR HOURS.
i'm serious. i have some experience with jackhammers, so i know what i'm hearing. and jesus fucking christ, i understand most of the this "beautification" shit "needs" done and all that, but good fucking god couldn't you schedule some of the work being done ON THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE ACADEMIC BUILDINGS for times that aren't THE MIDDLE OF THE FUCKING DAY ON THE BUSIEST DAY OF THE WEEK?
i feel like there are mutated porcupines rolling around on the surface of my brain.
Sep 1, 2008
"props for fender" or "1.85 posts a day for almost a year"
now that i've spent the entire day plowing through caffeine and henri lefebvre's production of space, i finally have a little free time on my hands to be completely nuts.
ah...luxury.
i actually restrained myself from a rather lengthy drunk word-bender last night. so if you shuddered a bit in your sleep around 5am PST, it was just the ghost of my madness passing over your grave. or your door. or however that works.
tomorrow's my 12-hours-in-avery-by-default day, so i'm trying to get at least a little bit of other things going through my head before i go to bed and then wake up and dive straight into that...considering i worked all day today too, it's sort of a feat. but yesterday i did nothing work-related. and i also did lots of awesome things. so. i'm not complaining. i'm just objectively (?) observing my own thought-oscillations.
whew.
anyway (what kind of post would this be if i didn't use "anyway"?), the other day i passed the 500-post mark. which seems like a dorky thing to celebrate, were it not for the fact that i honestly think i'd be a lot more insane right now were it not for this blog. i started it about nine months ago after running a livejournal for a few years (and racking up less posts in a handful of years there than i've done in a handful of months here). it was the middle of fall (actually the beginning of what would become an incredibly long winter), and i was being forced to face full-on my inability to deal with solitude...something i'd been able to handily avoid the first two years in pullman thanks to help from a bunch of great people. which is not to say there weren't good people around last year, or that there aren't now. but the situation was suddenly different. i was completely responsible for avoiding loneliness now. nobody was going to help me. and it wasn't that i was unwilling to seek people out...i was. but in the process of that seeking out i also realized that i absolutely couldn't just keep jumping from friend to friend or relationship to relationship based on freaking out after i was alone by myself long enough that i started going nuts (about five days, for those keeping score). it was a problem, and i had to deal with it.
this blog has been really, really good for me in helping to deal with those sorts of things. i need to talk about stuff. i need to think things through, and when i can't, i need some room to explode. in the past, i've always relied on other people for these outlets...and i know i can't really do that anymore. so this has been a great place to get thoughts down, to ring my brain out, and at the same time to learn lessons about being comfortable with myself. the difference between writing in a notebook and writing online like this, for me, is that i know people are going to see everything that i write. so it's a challenge sometimes to write personal or intense things. but it's good. it's absolutely improved my ability to articulate myself in "real life" and to discuss things with people in "real life" that i wouldn't have been comfortable discussing before. it's taught me the necessity of dialogue...even if that dialogue is sometimes just me and a computer screen.
so...i know i blog a lot, but i blog a lot because i have a LOT of shit to say. not anything necessarily earth-shattering or important, but for me to make sense of life and to keep looking for meanings and loves and whatever else, i have to keep talking and sharing and hoping that someone else out there might want to talk back. if not, well, i've finally learned to deal with that. but...hope is nice.
there are many, many days that i could probably talk about life and books and writing and music and hiking and photos and every other goddamn thing under the sun for the whole 24 hours if there was someone who wanted to talk back. that would be awesome, but i also realize it's not likely (at least not usually, sometime's i'm lucky). so here i can get that stuff out without exploding. it's cool.
this homage was going to be brilliant and incisive, and i'm finding my ability to articulate has melted somewhere after paragraph three. so. long live fender. i'll keep blogging, but if anybody wants to mine stars with unicorn-horn pickaxes instead, give me a ring. i'm down...
ah...luxury.
i actually restrained myself from a rather lengthy drunk word-bender last night. so if you shuddered a bit in your sleep around 5am PST, it was just the ghost of my madness passing over your grave. or your door. or however that works.
tomorrow's my 12-hours-in-avery-by-default day, so i'm trying to get at least a little bit of other things going through my head before i go to bed and then wake up and dive straight into that...considering i worked all day today too, it's sort of a feat. but yesterday i did nothing work-related. and i also did lots of awesome things. so. i'm not complaining. i'm just objectively (?) observing my own thought-oscillations.
whew.
anyway (what kind of post would this be if i didn't use "anyway"?), the other day i passed the 500-post mark. which seems like a dorky thing to celebrate, were it not for the fact that i honestly think i'd be a lot more insane right now were it not for this blog. i started it about nine months ago after running a livejournal for a few years (and racking up less posts in a handful of years there than i've done in a handful of months here). it was the middle of fall (actually the beginning of what would become an incredibly long winter), and i was being forced to face full-on my inability to deal with solitude...something i'd been able to handily avoid the first two years in pullman thanks to help from a bunch of great people. which is not to say there weren't good people around last year, or that there aren't now. but the situation was suddenly different. i was completely responsible for avoiding loneliness now. nobody was going to help me. and it wasn't that i was unwilling to seek people out...i was. but in the process of that seeking out i also realized that i absolutely couldn't just keep jumping from friend to friend or relationship to relationship based on freaking out after i was alone by myself long enough that i started going nuts (about five days, for those keeping score). it was a problem, and i had to deal with it.
this blog has been really, really good for me in helping to deal with those sorts of things. i need to talk about stuff. i need to think things through, and when i can't, i need some room to explode. in the past, i've always relied on other people for these outlets...and i know i can't really do that anymore. so this has been a great place to get thoughts down, to ring my brain out, and at the same time to learn lessons about being comfortable with myself. the difference between writing in a notebook and writing online like this, for me, is that i know people are going to see everything that i write. so it's a challenge sometimes to write personal or intense things. but it's good. it's absolutely improved my ability to articulate myself in "real life" and to discuss things with people in "real life" that i wouldn't have been comfortable discussing before. it's taught me the necessity of dialogue...even if that dialogue is sometimes just me and a computer screen.
so...i know i blog a lot, but i blog a lot because i have a LOT of shit to say. not anything necessarily earth-shattering or important, but for me to make sense of life and to keep looking for meanings and loves and whatever else, i have to keep talking and sharing and hoping that someone else out there might want to talk back. if not, well, i've finally learned to deal with that. but...hope is nice.
there are many, many days that i could probably talk about life and books and writing and music and hiking and photos and every other goddamn thing under the sun for the whole 24 hours if there was someone who wanted to talk back. that would be awesome, but i also realize it's not likely (at least not usually, sometime's i'm lucky). so here i can get that stuff out without exploding. it's cool.
this homage was going to be brilliant and incisive, and i'm finding my ability to articulate has melted somewhere after paragraph three. so. long live fender. i'll keep blogging, but if anybody wants to mine stars with unicorn-horn pickaxes instead, give me a ring. i'm down...
MIXTAPE - August 1/2
a'ight (i forget if i usually apostrophize that shit or not). after three months of mixtape miasma, i've thrown together two CDs worth of shit from the last month and a half or so. i had a hard time wading through all the songs i wanted to use, so i ended making two mixtapes, each with pretty much the same artist lineup, but different tracks.
i just finished these a bit ago (instead of working, of course)...but sendspace kicked total ass (maybe because everyone's still off the VPN due to it being labor day) and so here they are.
August 1:
1. Ryan Adams - So Alive
2. Maritime - Tearing Up the Oxygen
3. Joseph Arthur - In the Sun
4. Radiohead - Jigsaw Falling Into Place
5. Margot and the Nuclear So-and-Sos - Quiet As a Mouse
6. The Shins - Caring Is Creepy
7. Soul Coughing - Disseminated
8. She & Him - Black Hole
9. The White Stripes - Prickly Thorn, But Sweetly Worn
10. Billy Bragg and Wilco - California Stars
11. Roger Hoover and the Whiskeyhounds - Keep Me Away From You
12. The Raconteurs - Old Enough
13. Mason Jennings - Soldier Boy
14. Wilco - Company In My Back
15. Nujabes (feat. Shing02) - Luv (sic.) pt. 3
16. Ryan Adams - So Alive (Acoustic Version, Live)
August 2:
1. Love - Always See Your Face
2. Wilco - Hummingbird
3. She & Him - Change Is Hard
4. M. Ward - I'll Be Yr Bird
5. Billy Bragg and Wilco - Ingrid Bergman
6. Roger Hoover and the Whiskeyhounds - Like Dylan Thomas
7. Patrick Sweany - Your Man
8. Sun Kil Moon - Moorestown
9. The Shins - New Slang
10. Margot and the Nuclear So-and-Sos - Paper Kitten Nightmare
11. Maritime - We Don't Think, We Know
12. Radiohead - Nude
13. Nujabes - reflection eternal
14. Mason Jennings - In Your City
15. Buena Vista Social Club - Pueblo Nuevo
16. The White Stripes - I'm Lonely (But I Ain't That Lonely Yet)
i just finished these a bit ago (instead of working, of course)...but sendspace kicked total ass (maybe because everyone's still off the VPN due to it being labor day) and so here they are.
August 1:
1. Ryan Adams - So Alive
2. Maritime - Tearing Up the Oxygen
3. Joseph Arthur - In the Sun
4. Radiohead - Jigsaw Falling Into Place
5. Margot and the Nuclear So-and-Sos - Quiet As a Mouse
6. The Shins - Caring Is Creepy
7. Soul Coughing - Disseminated
8. She & Him - Black Hole
9. The White Stripes - Prickly Thorn, But Sweetly Worn
10. Billy Bragg and Wilco - California Stars
11. Roger Hoover and the Whiskeyhounds - Keep Me Away From You
12. The Raconteurs - Old Enough
13. Mason Jennings - Soldier Boy
14. Wilco - Company In My Back
15. Nujabes (feat. Shing02) - Luv (sic.) pt. 3
16. Ryan Adams - So Alive (Acoustic Version, Live)
August 2:
1. Love - Always See Your Face
2. Wilco - Hummingbird
3. She & Him - Change Is Hard
4. M. Ward - I'll Be Yr Bird
5. Billy Bragg and Wilco - Ingrid Bergman
6. Roger Hoover and the Whiskeyhounds - Like Dylan Thomas
7. Patrick Sweany - Your Man
8. Sun Kil Moon - Moorestown
9. The Shins - New Slang
10. Margot and the Nuclear So-and-Sos - Paper Kitten Nightmare
11. Maritime - We Don't Think, We Know
12. Radiohead - Nude
13. Nujabes - reflection eternal
14. Mason Jennings - In Your City
15. Buena Vista Social Club - Pueblo Nuevo
16. The White Stripes - I'm Lonely (But I Ain't That Lonely Yet)
that's ironing for you.
this just popped up on my google ticker:
"Life is something to do when you can't get to sleep."
that's generally pretty true for me. especially right now. i'm pretty sure i could shoot lightning out of my fingertips if i could harness the power driving my current neurotic-ass worrying/excited thoughts around in the 200-lane roundabout that comprises my brain.
i might just be up all night. again. bah/w00t?
i'm confused...
"Life is something to do when you can't get to sleep."
that's generally pretty true for me. especially right now. i'm pretty sure i could shoot lightning out of my fingertips if i could harness the power driving my current neurotic-ass worrying/excited thoughts around in the 200-lane roundabout that comprises my brain.
i might just be up all night. again. bah/w00t?
i'm confused...
my skeleton is exploding
post #500 was going to be this big huge post about lots of things. a celebration, of sorts. of expression. and of antisocial nerdiness without which this blog would not exist. however, i'm past 500 now and it's probably not within my capacity to express complicated feelings right now.
but, since i can't really look at anything right now without being able to see the molecules that make it up dividing under the surface, i should probably abstain until tomorrow.
but, since i can't really look at anything right now without being able to see the molecules that make it up dividing under the surface, i should probably abstain until tomorrow.
absolutelyfuckingbeautifulamazingasfuck
just found this on the RA blog. i'm a little drunk and other stuff...but still. god. god fucking incredible.
it takes two from Wilson Wolf on Vimeo.
it takes two from Wilson Wolf on Vimeo.
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