January 2011
49 posts
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“A man’s at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know...”
– Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
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experienced last night and written today
i looked at the air about six feet in front of me. then i looked at the air across the room. a woman sat in between those two airs. she was talking. she gestured as though weighing a pear. i tried holding her between the gazes of my eyes like a cigarette between two fingers. she looked two-dimensional. she looked like living paper. there was no depth. there were only surfaces moving in parallax....
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why hipsters and tea party people are not so...
the tea party has no unified position. they have instead a unified rhetoric. the point is not what the words mean but how they sound. a tea party speech is more like music than like language.
michelle bachmann’s speech made no coherent sense. that wasn’t the point. the point was how it sounded. tea party people were supposed to listen to it and say “that sounds like the sort of...
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last night i said something like this:
“if you throw the world up into the air it should come together into configurations. the fact that this doesn’t happen drives me nuts.”
my friends looked at me strangely. i had revealed too much.
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“A popular tradition warns against recounting dreams the next morning on an empty...”
– Walter Benjamin, “One-Way Street”
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snowflakes
People love to harp on how no two snowflakes are exactly alike, as though that were anything worth noting. What two things are ever exactly alike? It is only since the advent of mass production, since our lives became filled with and defined by things manufactured to look exactly alike, that the “no two snowflakes are exactly alike” wisdom could have any pathos at all. No two Duracell AA...
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“To him who looks at the world rationally the world looks rationally back.”
– Hegel, “Reason in History”
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phiLOLZophy: Society Lets Men Down →
i am so angry about how completely right this is. i disagree only with the title. “society” is not letting men down. we are letting ourselves down. society is just following our lead. twenty years from now maybe women will run everything and entrust nothing to men. and fuck—maybe that wouldn’t even be so bad. i’m sure it would be better than the converse (i.e. what...
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anis shivani - new rules for writers →
this might be the best thing i’ve ever read on the internet.
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“Any way you turn, I’ll be there
Open up your skull, I’ll be there...”
– Radiohead, “Climbing Up the Walls”
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“Come mothers and fathers, throughout the land
And don’t criticize what...”
– Bob Dylan, “The Times, They Are A-Changing”
you may not hear from me for a little while. the internet had eroded my capacity to exist from within. the little spurts of pleasure i got from seeing that someone had followed me or liked my post were silently becoming the seat of my being. i must take myself back. that might entail a break from the internet.
don’t worry. i won’t forget you if you don’t forget me. and...
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“Everything that keeps it together is falling apart,
I got this thing that I...”
– Modest Mouse, “3rd Planet”
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“Oh, gotta see, gotta know right now,
What’s that riding on your...”
– Modest Mouse, “Gravity Rides Everything”
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style note—honestly!
it is almost impossible to use any of the following words and phrases—honestly; frankly; quite frankly; to be frank; to be honest; to be quite frank; to be perfectly honest—without sounding like a sniveling passive-aggressive little bitch. use them with extreme caution.
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“It’s nothing he can see or lay hands on—sudden gases, a violence upon the...”
– Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, p. 25
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“I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for...”
– T.S. Eliot, “East Coker”
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“We do not need a dead mausoleum of art where dead works are worshipped, but a...”
– Vladimir Mayakovsky (via fuckyeahexistentialism)
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taking pictures of tiny things
i just saw tiny furniture and am interested in figuring out if there is a deeper meaning to this taking photos of tiny things thing. i think there is. at the end of the month i will see marwencol at the brattle theater and then triangulate. something about creating a little dollhouse version of your life inside your life as a way of feeling like you’ve mastered it. more on this later.
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“I WISH THE INTERNET WOULD JUST BREAK”
– anonymous
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from my notebook—11/28/10 (re: my magnum opus)
fuck it: why not start planning my magnum opus? the one that talks about:
the ice age and the transition from hunter-gatherer to agrarian societies; the four elements and the planets and the planetary metals; protons and electrons; kabbalah; beethoven going deaf; walter benjamin trying to scribble down one last thesis on the philosophy of history before the gestapo are knocking on his door and...
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from my notebook—1/6/11 (i.e. today)
we are all like that poor bastard in memento. the erosion of memory leads to an overburdening of the present. the felt unreality of the past and the future makes the present the sole locus of reality. but the present alone is not strong enough to bear the full burden of reality. it needs the support of the past just like a young king needs the support of his forefathers. he must know at every...
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style note—aphorism
we are all afflicted with premature alzheimer’s. we are all like that poor bastard in memento. our minds can only hold a moment’s worth of thought. each moment must therefore count as much as possible.
a sentence is a moment’s worth of language. an aphorism is a sentence that counts as much as possible.
our sentences must not lean on each other like wounded soldiers. each one...
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“We, it seems, are critical; we are embarrassed with second thoughts; we cannot...”
– Emerson, “The American Scholar”
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well? have you? →
trishsthedish:
If you could go back in time, what would you do differently? My answer to that is a lot. Honestly, people have guts for saying nothing at all. But I’m pretty sure that at least 50% of those people are just liars. How could you not change anything? I mean yes, life is actually beautiful once you take a step away from your own and see all the parts that constitute it. At the same...
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“What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you in your loneliest...”
– Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §341
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from my notebook—11/28/10 (re: the next frontier)
what is the next frontier? in technology the next frontier is smart matter. neri oxman (ed: who is maybe the hottest woman on the planet and also a genius. i’m a bit in love with her) said materials are the new software.
that sounds metaphysical to me. the structuring element is immanent within the material itself. that sounds like leibniz.
the new frontier is the nano world. it is the...
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“EVERYONE
EVERYONE AROUND HERE
EVERYONE IS SO NEAR
SO ALONE
SO ALONE”
– Radiohead, “The National Anthem”
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from my notebook—11/28/10 (re: poetry=language...
the other day mel (ed: mel is my bestfriend and exfiance) told me i’m a poet. i thought about how you really can be a poet and not know it. poetry is not merely one more artform among others. it holds a special place among modalities of language just as language holds a special place among the human faculties. the german word for poetry is “dichtung” which means...
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perfect 10.0
in all of the 2000s only three albums received a perfect 10.0 from pitchfork upon initial release:
kid a by radiohead
source tags & codes by …and you will know us by the trail of dead
yankee hotel foxtrot by wilco
i’ma go on the record right now and say that all three of those albums COMPLETELY DESERVED a 10.0. especially the first two. the third was maybe a 9.8. i’ma...
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from my notebook—11/28/10 (re: kanye west)
(NOTE: i do not feel this way anymore. (that is i am no longer glad that the critics all shot their wads over the new kanye. the criticism of pitchfork still holds.))
my beautiful dark twisted fantasy is not worthy of its worshipful reception but that’s okay. i’m glad everyone gave it a perfect ten even though it didn’t deserve a perfect ten.
the album itself does not deserve a...
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from my notebook - 11/28/10
no one is immune to the lure of the internet. after every sentence i must fight the urge to turn my computer back on and check to see if— to see if what? it is left unspecified. the trouble with instant gratification is you get what you want so instantly that you don’t have time to think about whether or not you actually want it.
i want to go on the internet to check something. check...
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style note—no commas
no one uses commas anymore and i’m glad. they slow things down. i now write with no subordinate clauses at all. they disrupt the immediacy. from now on i’m just using periods. no commas. no semicolons. not even my beloved double-dash. i’m stripping away all superfluity. nothing should remain but the naked essence of language.
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style note—sans
writing “sans” in place of “without” is really cool.
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style note—ending sentences with prepositions
it’s nothing to be ashamed of.
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style note—lowercase
if you ask someone why they like something and they say “i like it for aesthetic reasons,” they did not answer your question. all they did was tell you they don’t know why they like it. aesthetics is the study of why people like the things they like. there is always a reason. usually it is quite specific even if elusive. elusive things are there. you just have to look for them....
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style note—the aphoristic 1-2 punch
express the idea twice: first in prosaic longhand, second in poetic shorthand.
example: “The nature that was the staple subject of the romantic artists of Europe bore copious signs of an interchange with everlasting human aspirations. Ruins gave wildflowers their meaning.” -Larzer Ziff, introduction to Selected Essays of Emerson
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new years day part 1
first morning of 2011 i wake up at 9:30 feeling splendid. shower breakfast coffee then out the door to coleman’s dorm a few blocks from my house. coleman is still asleep when i call at 11 so i wait outside on a bench humming the riff from the last movement of beethoven’s 5th symphony. the world feels brand new and i am loving life.
coleman calls me at 11:30 and comes down to let me...
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“I ordered my horse to be brought from the stables. The servant did not...”
– Kafka, “The Departure”