strays

“Effective” by Kerry Giangrande

“I could do this forever,” I tell the words.
Won’t you get tired? The answer is yes, very tired.
We will lose meaning on the way, we will become gibberish.

We will not fit in stories or poems, but stand alone on stray lines.
We will be lonely and no one will love us. Few speak this language,
I hear it in my sleep.

****

The sun rises every morning. I do not rise every morning; but the variation is due not to my activity, but to my inaction. Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life. The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, ‘Do it again’; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again’ to the sun; and every evening, ‘Do it again’ to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.

- G.K. Chesterton

***

In the deepest ocean
The bottom of the sea
Your eyes
They turn me

Why should I stay here?
Why should I stay?

I’d be crazy not to follow
Follow where you lead
Your eyes
They turn me

Turn me on to phantoms
I follow to the edge of the earth
And fall off
Everybody leaves
If they get the chance
And this is my chance

I get eaten by the worms
And weird fishes
Picked over by the worms
And weird fishes

- Thom Yorke

***

If he exalts himself, I humble him.
If he humbles himself, I exhalt him.
And I go on contradicting him
Until he understands
That he is a monster that passes all understanding.

- Blaise Pascal

***

“I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too. I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wondering awed about on a splintered wreck I’ve come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty bats and shines not in its imperfections but overwhelmingly in spite of them.”

- Annie Dillard

***

“Better hope deferred than none.”

- Sam Beckett

“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”

- Italo Calvino

***

“There is no escape. You can’t be a vagabond and an artist and still be a solid citizen, a wholesome, upstanding man. You want to get drunk, so you have to accept the hangover. You say yes to the sunlight and pure fantasies, so you have to say yes to the filth and the nausea. Everything is within you, gold and mud, happiness and pain, the laughter of childhood and the apprehension of death. Say yes to everything, shirk nothing. Don’t try to lie to yourself. You are not a solid citizen. You are not a Greek. You are not harmonious, or the master of yourself. You are a bird in the storm. Let it storm! Let it drive you!”

- Herman Hesse

***

Wittgenstein did not argue; he merely thought himself into subtler and deeper problems The record which three of his students have made of his lectures and conversations at Cambridge discloses a man tragically honest and wonderfully, astoundingly absurd. In every memoir of him we meet a man we are hungry to know more about, for even if his every sentence remains opaque to us, it is clear that the archaic transparency of his thought is like nothing that philosophy has seen for thousands of years. It is also clear that he was trying to be wise and to make others wise. He lived in the world, and for the world. He came to believe that a normal, honest human being could not be a professor. It is the academy that gave him his reputation of impenetrable abstruseness; never has a man deserved a reputation less. Disciples who came to him expecting to find a man of incredibly deep learning found a man who saw mankind held together by suffering alone, and he invariably advised them to be as kind as possible to others. He read, like all inquisitive men, to multiply his experiences. He read Tolstoy (always getting bogged down) and the Gospels and bales of detective stories. He shook his head over Freud. When he died, he was reading Black Beauty. His last words were: “Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.”

- Guy Davenport, The Geography of the Imagination


my tumblr addiction is out of control

just a bit of lolz,

unattended children

soon, i’m going to do a link post to all the tumblr feeds i really love and i bet looking through all those pictures you’ll learn as much about me as you have from reading this blog for the past seven years or so.

sometimes i can’t even begin to understand what the internet has become.


A movie idea

Pretty much everyone has seen the Jude Apatow films where the plot revolves around a group of male Gen Y slackers – dudes without careers or partners or anything resembling ‘adult’ normative behavior.

My question is: why is there no female equivalent to these films? Where are the groups of slacker girlfriends?

Apatow’s films are sexist, but the displays of male friendships outside of the normal gay/straight binary in these films is important – it doesn’t make up for all the rubbish in between, but it’s worth acknowledging.

I wonder: why does hollywood have so much difficulty imaging a female subculture that’s not about buying purses, shoes, and wedding dresses?

Discuss.


The loneliest job in the world

“The Loneliest Job in the World” by Tony Hoagland

As soon as you begin to ask the question, Who loves me?,
you are completely screwed, because
the next question is How Much?,

and then it is hundreds of hours later,
and you are still hunched over
your flowcharts and abacus,

trying to decide if you have gotten enough.
This is the loneliest job in the world:
to be an accountant of the heart.

It is late at night. You are by yourself,
and all around you, you can hear
the sounds of people moving

in and out of love,
pushing the turnstiles, putting
their coins in the slots,

paying the price which is asked,
which constantly changes.
No one knows why.


A pair of ideas about life

Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination are omnipotent. The slogan ‘press on’ has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.

-Calvin Coolidge

Music and Life – the pot of gold : An animated quote, 2 min. 20 sec.

Do these two ideas sound somewhat contradictory to one another? I’m not sure… One is telling you to push onward and achieve, the other is telling you to slow down and enjoy life. I want to think of them as having two different messages, speaking for different ends, but they both seem to discuss being goal-oriented.

The Coolidge quote I find motivating, especially for huge tasks that need to be broken into several smaller steps. That’s how I succeed when I take on problems. Sometimes I want to say this exact thing to those people in my life who sometimes feel unmotivated to complete a nearby and achievable goal. I want to show them how easy it can be to solve problems when you stop and do the steps one at a time, but I have found that to be a folly on my part. Almost always I am attempting to influence their attitude, their fundamental disposition. An unstoppable force hits the immovable object and things just ricochet everywhere and I want to pick up the broken mess and put it back like it began.

The Watts video is an alarmingly accurate truth about the sadness of Western culture. It is an understated critique of the “pot-of-gold” that people have midlife crises over. Some people manage to hear and sing to the music when they are young enough, but I think most people do not.

Maybe the combination of these problems is causing a huge rift in understanding between two distinct groups of people in America today.

Coolidge people: the people who uphold traditional “American Dream” values. I think people who uphold these values can be truly happy. We all know people whom we think personify these values and their success stories, but I think most people (lets quantify… 90%) can’t find happiness this way. The number of factors that have to align in their favor (intense preparation, opportunity, a personality of perfectionism to achieve lofty goals) is startlingly high, and their definition of success is difficult to accomplish. In fact, even when some of them get there, they might find that Watts has been ringing true all along and they feel cheated in missing out on the journey. Sometimes, we hear the more vocal ones (I’m talking about you, Sean Hannity) feel they need a scapegoat for why their life is shitty, and they have turned bitter. They might blame other people who don’t uphold the same values. They tend to think out loud: “Those worthless human beings who don’t succeed are worthless because they are too lazy to pull themselves together. They are bringing the value of society down.”

Watts people: the people who are disillusioned about Western ideals of “success” and who don’t identify with the expectations (or value system) of society. Interestingly, I find that more often these people tend to show their happiness more freely throughout their life. However, for those Watts people who haven’t figured out that they are Watts people, they seem to be a generally depressed bunch who are holding on to something they don’t really believe in.

I don’t mean to suggest that everyone should be Wattsian. But I think most people would be happier if they were.

I’m sorry to have dragged this on, I really just wanted to post the two ideas about life. Which group do you most identify with? Or rather, what group do your choices and actions identify you with?

My life choices seem to indicate that I’m a Coolidge person. From the outside it looks like i’m aggressively chasing the American Dream. But I feel like I’m really a Watts person who plays a Coolidge person at work, perhaps moreso because of the people whom I work with.

If you really want to know, I find that I am undeniably fortunate to have enough interest AND ability AND education AND determination in an industry / field that allows me to pursue the things I want, or the things I think I want anyways. I may actually be in that 10% who can “make it” and be happy with it. But I think sometime in my adolescence, maybe ten years ago, I found the music of life to dance to, if you’ll pardon the cheesy metaphor.

Post Scriptum note about Hannity: He and his ilk are like a terrible virus infecting and festering in an otherwise perfectly habitable and progressive America. Shameful. What, did I go too far?


Searchers

“Searchers” by Jim Harrison

At dawn Warren is on my bed,
a ragged lump of fur listening
to the birds as if deciding whether or not
to catch one. He has an old man’s
mimsy delusion. A rabbit runs across
the yard and he walks after it
thinking he might close the widening distance
just as when I followed a lovely woman
on boulevard Montparnasse but couldn’t equal
her rapid pace, the click-click of her shoes
moving into the distance, turning the final
corner, but when I turned the corner
she had disappeared and I looked up
into the trees thinking she might have climbed one.
When I was young a country girl would climb
a tree and throw apples down at my upturned face.
Warren and I are both searchers. He’s looking
for his dead sister Shirley, and I’m wondering
about my brother John who left the earth
on this voyage all living creatures take.
Both cat and man are bathed in pleasant
insignificance, their eyes fixed on birds and stars.


Why we argue

Notes on Rhetoric is an excellent starting point for those wishing to hone their casual debate skills, but I also find it a depressing reminder of how difficult it can be for people to actually understand one another.

Though I’m more interested in conversation than critical argument these days, I’ve noticed that skilled casual debaters almost always “win” arguments based on their ability to manipulate various rhetorical devices rather than say, actually being factually correct. Some of the tactics listed above are so demoralizing to would-be debaters that most people would rather simply concede than have to suffer through even a few minutes of thrashing.

Frustratingly though, in the age of Google, everyone considers themselves an expert on everything. Every piece of information, every fact, is up for debate or dispute. Qualifications and real world experience don’t matter – opinion is everything and it is the great equalizer.

Is anyone else really tired of this? What happened to people’s willingness to actually defer judgement (or at least listen) to those who are clearly more objectively qualified?


still accepting letters

Today at work I met someone from California and he congratulated me on the Saint’s recent superbowl win.

I really enjoyed getting congratulated for something that I didn’t (help the team) accomplish, so consider this my open letter to the rest of the United States:

Dear States,

I am still accepting congratulations for the recent superbowl victory by the New Orleans Saints. If you haven’t sent me congratulations yet, you should consider doing so now. All congratulations and well wishes will be taken in until tax day – after that you can move on to congratulating yourself for doing your civic duty.

Talk to you later,

Jon


P squared

Lyra learns to her great cost that fantasy isn’t enough. She has been lying all her life, telling stories to people, making up fantasies, and suddenly she comes to a point where that’s not enough. All she can do is tell the truth. She tells the truth about her childhood, about the experiences she had in Oxford, and that is what saves her. True experience, not fantasy – reality, not lies – is what saves us in the end.

Philip Pullman

Philip Pullman please finish and release the Book of Dust, soon. I’m only reading magazines until you do. Thnx!


Funny Avatar Review

You know what, I had an enjoyable time watching Avatar. Well, enjoyable until the 2 hour mark – at that point my eyeballs felt like they were going to ooze out of my head from exhaustion. But until then, it was fun.

Let’s be honest, though. Normally, I hate big stupid blockbusters and if I hadn’t gone to the theater with such nice people and been in such an exceptionally good mood, I would have written a review similar to the one posted here.

Avatar is a nineteen-hour long film about a stupid ex-Marine who is employed by one of those The Companys one often hears about in science fiction movies to infiltrate the native American Indian/blue panther population of a planet because all the good stuff—a propertyless mineral called unobtanium (haw haw, I write scripts and look at the Internet!)—is under their giant tree. The Marine, who was injured and without the use of his legs in his human body, is named Sully (because he is SULLYING a natural world) and there is a careful scientist named Grace (because she is not exploitive and horrible and can be said to live in a state of GRACE) and an old soldier in charge of blowing things up whose name I didn’t catch, but it was probably something like Colonel McEarthrape. (Because he likes to RAPE the EARTH, even when he isn’t on it!)

Really, go and read the whole thing, because it’s some of the funniest writing I have encountered on the internet in years.

And if you don’t bother to click through, I’ll just post the end here because it really is too good to miss:

Avatar is as stupid as Transformers 2 and for those with a brain in their heads is twice as offensive. I’m not easily offended; I even think the White Guy Becomes An Indian thing can be done well on rare occasions—Howard Waldrop’s Them Bones comes to mind—but this movie was just awful. How awful? I left as soon as the credits started to roll, but even as I ran for the lobby I heard a snippet of lyrics from the end credits theme. Here’s the first verse:

Walking through a dream, I see you
My light and darkness breathing hope of new life
Now I live through you and you through me, enchanted
I pray in my heart that this dream never ends

Now imagine your school days, and someone handing you these lyrics in the form of a note. And when you open up the note to read it, they start crying because they just love you so much and wanted to share their feelings for you through poetry. Wouldn’t it be better if aliens just came down and killed us all? See, I knew you’d see what I mean.

One of the great things about the internet is that it confirms that there are people out there just like me. Keep signaling the aliens people, keep signaling.


San D!

san diego

Pardon the crappy quality, it was a disposable film camera. At least it looks retro.

*Updated 1/15/10 to include titles and second roll.


First Post!

I totally have the first post for 2010. WIN!


Political Infographic Time

I really enjoyed this infographic from information is beautiful.

Although it focuses on two major political stereotypes (and nothing in between), I still think it’s a great graphic.


God Bless the Experimental Writers

“God Bless the Experimental Writers” by Corey Mesler

for David Markson

“One beginning and one ending for a book was a
thing I did not agree with.”

Flann O’Brien from At Swim-Two-Birds

God bless the experimental writers.
The ones whose work is a little
difficult, built of tinkertoys
and dada, or portmanteau and
Reich. God help them as they
type away, knowing their readers
are few, only those who love to toil
over an intricate boil of language,
who think books are secret codes.
These writers will never see their names
in Publisher’s Weekly. They will
never be on the talk shows. Yet,
every day they disappear into their
rooms atop their mother’s houses,
or their guest houses behind some
lawyer’s estate. Every day they
tack improbable word onto im-
probable word, out of love, children,
out of a desire to emend the world.


Cats throw up grass

A must-read for all cat owners: how to tell if your cat is plotting to kill you!