Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Extending the Metaphor (Reposted)
Everyone says America is a melting pot when they want to talk about diversity. I think this is very general and weak, and we deserve a more extended metaphor. For example, I think it'd take longer for some groups to melt compared to others. Communists would have a really high melting point like carbon and maybe black people can be tungsten
On We Go, Flying Back to Greece (Reposted)
For whatever reason, right now, I feel shockingly in tune with my room and the world. Let the following words try and reflect that feeling, because in the morning I'll undoubtedly be in a much different mood.
"What troubled sleep have you known, to speak of my dreams? No matter how sweet, a dream left unrealized must fade into day."
I think my brain has been totally election'd out so it's started to turn itself to more fruitful enterprises, fixating on all sorts of smaller things I don't typically notice. For one, I've suddenly become much more concerned with the amount of money I spend around on a day-to-day sort of basis. Not that I just spend money wildly, but I think it's just a small reflection of some greater type of emotional hypochondria. Lots of things on the mind of everyone, people just yelling and screaming and falling in love. Can't sleep now, haven't slept lately, not-sleep begetting irritability begetting all sorts of not-hope. I might be turning to the Dark Side without even knowing it. Maybe in a few weeks I can force lightning my Bio IA folder. More as this develops.
So, there's that, amongst other things. Someone died lately, not someone I knew personally, but a relative to a friend in Maine. Got me thinking all kinds of death, between all the phone calls and CNN.com and the Day of the Dead. Death exists, not as the opposite but as a part of life. Translated into words it's certainly a cliche, but now I feel it as not-words but some knot of air in my chest. Death exists-- in bricks and sycamores-- and we go on living and breathing it into our lungs like fine dust.
I don't know where to go from here, haha. I'm trying to put into words some feelings I've been having lately (there have been a few), but it's difficult. We're all these placid surfaces; I want to be anesthetized so someone can cut me back and see all the little buggers crawling around under the surface. I think if people could do that type of operation, a real "self-revelation," we'd see all sorts of deaths. Can you imagine looking at yourself, your essence, your aura, all naked and exposed? Someone ripping it out and plopping it down on some desk, the thing squirming around on the table like some giant eel-fish. I know I wouldn't be able to handle it. I'd die from shock right there staring at my writing eel-fish asphyxiate in all the oxygen.
I think sometimes we all get so close to getting a peek we just collapse inward. That's necessarily a bad thing though, if you think about it. Growth isn't always such a good thing-- sometimes you just need to move.
"What troubled sleep have you known, to speak of my dreams? No matter how sweet, a dream left unrealized must fade into day."
I think my brain has been totally election'd out so it's started to turn itself to more fruitful enterprises, fixating on all sorts of smaller things I don't typically notice. For one, I've suddenly become much more concerned with the amount of money I spend around on a day-to-day sort of basis. Not that I just spend money wildly, but I think it's just a small reflection of some greater type of emotional hypochondria. Lots of things on the mind of everyone, people just yelling and screaming and falling in love. Can't sleep now, haven't slept lately, not-sleep begetting irritability begetting all sorts of not-hope. I might be turning to the Dark Side without even knowing it. Maybe in a few weeks I can force lightning my Bio IA folder. More as this develops.
So, there's that, amongst other things. Someone died lately, not someone I knew personally, but a relative to a friend in Maine. Got me thinking all kinds of death, between all the phone calls and CNN.com and the Day of the Dead. Death exists, not as the opposite but as a part of life. Translated into words it's certainly a cliche, but now I feel it as not-words but some knot of air in my chest. Death exists-- in bricks and sycamores-- and we go on living and breathing it into our lungs like fine dust.
I don't know where to go from here, haha. I'm trying to put into words some feelings I've been having lately (there have been a few), but it's difficult. We're all these placid surfaces; I want to be anesthetized so someone can cut me back and see all the little buggers crawling around under the surface. I think if people could do that type of operation, a real "self-revelation," we'd see all sorts of deaths. Can you imagine looking at yourself, your essence, your aura, all naked and exposed? Someone ripping it out and plopping it down on some desk, the thing squirming around on the table like some giant eel-fish. I know I wouldn't be able to handle it. I'd die from shock right there staring at my writing eel-fish asphyxiate in all the oxygen.
I think sometimes we all get so close to getting a peek we just collapse inward. That's necessarily a bad thing though, if you think about it. Growth isn't always such a good thing-- sometimes you just need to move.
What I Talk About When I Talk About Pokemon (Reposted)
After coming home today I found the latest Rolling Stone stuffed in my mailbox with a giant photo of Barack Obama on the cover (inside I learned he's been on the magazine cover three times in seven months--a tie for John Lennon). But, Obama isn't my focus tonight, just the type of culture I think he's been unwillingly labeled as representing.
This particular copy of Rolling Stone is one of the more inspiring editions I've gotten since the one about The Police's reunion tour a few years ago (but that was inspiring in a much different, more irrelevant sort of personal way). I read it, and it was the same type of tired assemblage I've come to expect from the editorial staff over the last year: some interviews, the same flat partisan "essays" on the GOP, some photographs of semi-famous pretentious musicians, some "introspectives" on more semi-famous people, some crap about the aborted record industry, and a tacked on section of music reviews slowly dwindling in critical quality.
I just re-read that and it sounds very critical, and that's because I am very critical of Rolling Stone's work--this edition just presented somethings that spurred -my- wheels of cognition, and I thought I'd share those with you in this blog post. I suppose that, for tonight, Rolling Stone is my muse, but in only in a similar sense that grape soda inspires Nagasaki-calibur bowel movements. Let's continue.
I've always been really confused about how my culture, my "generation," the time I just happened to live, would fit into history. In 17 years I've seen the fall of communism, the internet, Bill Clinton, George Bush, readily-available XXX pornography, post-postmodernism, the LHC, and within the week, most likely Barack Obama. If you're reading this, you've seen the same stuff, and well, it's a -lot- folks. We've seen so much historic shit, but that historic air seems to be missing. The War on Terror is the "Terri Schavio version" of the Crossing of the Delaware, but even this war is lacking -that- aura, the aura that surrounded George Washington in 1776 as strongly as it does now. I think we're living in a vacuum: history has been ripped through a continuum, reprocessed to appear in our eyes as Mars to Galileo through his first lens telescope, a fuzzy ring of color making everything blurry and uncertain. This is the feeling I'll remember most about my childhood--some chronic "temporary-ness," the sense that Time could have gone from 1990 to 2020 without missing anything but a commercial break. It is this feeling that I'm wearing, a feeling like a familiar hoodie I just got found in the bottom of the closet.
So, I don't think, even in the middle of all this groundbreaking-ness, that we're doing anything historic. This feeling seems inextricably linked, to me, to the sensation that I was born in the middle of some metaphysical English channel. I mean, really, you're my age, think about it: we're all born around 1990. Born right there between the end of a proverbial feast and the certain vomiting to follow. This "feast" I speak of gets it start right there at the close of WWII and persists right up to me, to us. If the post-War world is a ship moving under the sail of intellectual progress and betterment, then my band of existence coincides with a Scilla storm, the ship crashing under the weight of itself, that sail of intellectual and humanitarian progress ripped asunder. What survives? Flotsam something akin to Euripidean cynicism and world-weariness.
The root of this "shipwreck" is a sweeping type of movement, a movement without growth. Our parents facilitated the creation of a cultural vacuum that is currently spinning faster than anyone can truly comprehend, a vacuum we were born into accepting as normalcy, inasmuch that it has sucked up and distorted all of our external stimuli. This goes back to the foggy sense of the present I was discussing earlier: we have accelerated our culture beyond a level of comprehension in the present. Think of it as doing a book report on a book you've never read; Everyone says you have an incredible sense of literary analysis and insight into this book, even if no one else has read the fucking book. It's not a lie, per se, but it's not exactly a fact: just something akin to a cut scabbing over without the aid of red blot clots.
I think this is coming off as confusing, mainly because I'm writing as I think and I don't think these thoughts are particularly lucid. It sounds like I don't think anyone has given the world anything significant since 1950, and that's just not true. We pour ourselves into supersaturated skylines and wind up underground, under Volcanoes.
If you think our problems are bad, just wait until you see our solutions.
I feel in a few years, after Time merges onto I-20 towards Atlanta and we're all left at the Summit, that the plaid-wearing rejection of "the System" will define whatever-the-fuck it is I'm living in, just like the past four decades are just extensions of mass-produced individualisms and revolts against some Order. I don't see anything oppressive about my life or my government (well, Dick Cheney aside). I think people want something to hate just to hate something. It's like "well, democracy is the norm, so fuck it. Go communism! And my expression. Hey cool, Che shirts--17.99! Good thing I got paid last week." Then their kids grow up to say the same damn thing about recycled constructions. I don't think I need to expand this argument because you've seen it and lived it. In forty years we'll all be pissed off at Ryan Adams treatment of the narrative pastoral and our place in whatever the popular form of government is. Then we'll grown up and our kids can go back to listening to Ryan Adams and hating us for whatever. Who cares. You get it--the act of mutual creation necessitates a reactionary and radical reaction, it's just that we cannot allow one to be both, or both to be one. They've got to stagger a bit before everything goes full circle.
And this is the paradox of accelerated culture. Example: in the 1960s everyone wanted Marilyn Monroe porn--until the internet, the best pornography involved above-average people of above-average sexuality and beauty doing the same stuff we all do with our comparatively "less attractive" friends. But now how many websites do you see with amateur housewife porn? Why does there exist an unquenchable need in the collective consciousness of men all across America to see shoddy, sketchy tapes of some creeper's thirty year old neighbor fucking her mailman? Without her make-up on? You get the idea, and that's the basis of our accelerated culture--an argument and its antithesis exist as the same thing and both are perceived as natural, logical progressions from A to B, where the end result is the same either way. That's our problem, and that's why everything is coated in not-aura nowadays, at least I think. The facts are there, but the analysis needs a few years to evolve to Charizard--we just can't understand ourselves just yet, but only because Ash pressed "B" during the evolution. But hey, because of that we get the really super awesome level 50 fire attack at level 46!
That's our culture. If you want to call it something (other than whatever you want to call it), name it "vacuum culture." Just don't say it sucks. You can't say that 4reel just yet.
This particular copy of Rolling Stone is one of the more inspiring editions I've gotten since the one about The Police's reunion tour a few years ago (but that was inspiring in a much different, more irrelevant sort of personal way). I read it, and it was the same type of tired assemblage I've come to expect from the editorial staff over the last year: some interviews, the same flat partisan "essays" on the GOP, some photographs of semi-famous pretentious musicians, some "introspectives" on more semi-famous people, some crap about the aborted record industry, and a tacked on section of music reviews slowly dwindling in critical quality.
I just re-read that and it sounds very critical, and that's because I am very critical of Rolling Stone's work--this edition just presented somethings that spurred -my- wheels of cognition, and I thought I'd share those with you in this blog post. I suppose that, for tonight, Rolling Stone is my muse, but in only in a similar sense that grape soda inspires Nagasaki-calibur bowel movements. Let's continue.
I've always been really confused about how my culture, my "generation," the time I just happened to live, would fit into history. In 17 years I've seen the fall of communism, the internet, Bill Clinton, George Bush, readily-available XXX pornography, post-postmodernism, the LHC, and within the week, most likely Barack Obama. If you're reading this, you've seen the same stuff, and well, it's a -lot- folks. We've seen so much historic shit, but that historic air seems to be missing. The War on Terror is the "Terri Schavio version" of the Crossing of the Delaware, but even this war is lacking -that- aura, the aura that surrounded George Washington in 1776 as strongly as it does now. I think we're living in a vacuum: history has been ripped through a continuum, reprocessed to appear in our eyes as Mars to Galileo through his first lens telescope, a fuzzy ring of color making everything blurry and uncertain. This is the feeling I'll remember most about my childhood--some chronic "temporary-ness," the sense that Time could have gone from 1990 to 2020 without missing anything but a commercial break. It is this feeling that I'm wearing, a feeling like a familiar hoodie I just got found in the bottom of the closet.
So, I don't think, even in the middle of all this groundbreaking-ness, that we're doing anything historic. This feeling seems inextricably linked, to me, to the sensation that I was born in the middle of some metaphysical English channel. I mean, really, you're my age, think about it: we're all born around 1990. Born right there between the end of a proverbial feast and the certain vomiting to follow. This "feast" I speak of gets it start right there at the close of WWII and persists right up to me, to us. If the post-War world is a ship moving under the sail of intellectual progress and betterment, then my band of existence coincides with a Scilla storm, the ship crashing under the weight of itself, that sail of intellectual and humanitarian progress ripped asunder. What survives? Flotsam something akin to Euripidean cynicism and world-weariness.
The root of this "shipwreck" is a sweeping type of movement, a movement without growth. Our parents facilitated the creation of a cultural vacuum that is currently spinning faster than anyone can truly comprehend, a vacuum we were born into accepting as normalcy, inasmuch that it has sucked up and distorted all of our external stimuli. This goes back to the foggy sense of the present I was discussing earlier: we have accelerated our culture beyond a level of comprehension in the present. Think of it as doing a book report on a book you've never read; Everyone says you have an incredible sense of literary analysis and insight into this book, even if no one else has read the fucking book. It's not a lie, per se, but it's not exactly a fact: just something akin to a cut scabbing over without the aid of red blot clots.
I think this is coming off as confusing, mainly because I'm writing as I think and I don't think these thoughts are particularly lucid. It sounds like I don't think anyone has given the world anything significant since 1950, and that's just not true. We pour ourselves into supersaturated skylines and wind up underground, under Volcanoes.
If you think our problems are bad, just wait until you see our solutions.
I feel in a few years, after Time merges onto I-20 towards Atlanta and we're all left at the Summit, that the plaid-wearing rejection of "the System" will define whatever-the-fuck it is I'm living in, just like the past four decades are just extensions of mass-produced individualisms and revolts against some Order. I don't see anything oppressive about my life or my government (well, Dick Cheney aside). I think people want something to hate just to hate something. It's like "well, democracy is the norm, so fuck it. Go communism! And my expression. Hey cool, Che shirts--17.99! Good thing I got paid last week." Then their kids grow up to say the same damn thing about recycled constructions. I don't think I need to expand this argument because you've seen it and lived it. In forty years we'll all be pissed off at Ryan Adams treatment of the narrative pastoral and our place in whatever the popular form of government is. Then we'll grown up and our kids can go back to listening to Ryan Adams and hating us for whatever. Who cares. You get it--the act of mutual creation necessitates a reactionary and radical reaction, it's just that we cannot allow one to be both, or both to be one. They've got to stagger a bit before everything goes full circle.
And this is the paradox of accelerated culture. Example: in the 1960s everyone wanted Marilyn Monroe porn--until the internet, the best pornography involved above-average people of above-average sexuality and beauty doing the same stuff we all do with our comparatively "less attractive" friends. But now how many websites do you see with amateur housewife porn? Why does there exist an unquenchable need in the collective consciousness of men all across America to see shoddy, sketchy tapes of some creeper's thirty year old neighbor fucking her mailman? Without her make-up on? You get the idea, and that's the basis of our accelerated culture--an argument and its antithesis exist as the same thing and both are perceived as natural, logical progressions from A to B, where the end result is the same either way. That's our problem, and that's why everything is coated in not-aura nowadays, at least I think. The facts are there, but the analysis needs a few years to evolve to Charizard--we just can't understand ourselves just yet, but only because Ash pressed "B" during the evolution. But hey, because of that we get the really super awesome level 50 fire attack at level 46!
That's our culture. If you want to call it something (other than whatever you want to call it), name it "vacuum culture." Just don't say it sucks. You can't say that 4reel just yet.
Let's Get Literary! (Reposted)
Uh, hey everyone! This is my first blog post ever, and thanks to James for welcoming me on board at Hemoblogin. I'm really excited, and I hope the handful of people out there who read this are as well.
I don't really know what a typical blog post consists of--personal reactions or more formal responses--but tonight I want to talk about literature, in a more informal matter compared to the likes of World Lit papers or the ACT Writing component (speaking of, wasn't the October ACT rather easy? Feel free to discuss).
Anyway, I've been making the time to read more lately. This is not to say that I have not enjoyed the school required Greek Theatre survey, but I've been making personal time for my buddies Haruki Murakami and Henrik Ibsen (if you're unfamiliar with these guys, you're missing out), and of course interjecting everything I do with a healthy bit of James Dickey and Extended Essay (I realize these parenthical passages are probably really annoying, but James Dickey is another literary badass I urge you to read. If you want to read 3,000 words on his excellent poem "The Sheep Child," just ask. I have no personal qualms with whoring out my Extended Essay). My basic point is that I've been reading a lot lately, and reaching some "lucid" levels of interpretation and analysis. This might sound pretentious, but bear with me.
It's really cool, this splattering of social Japanese commentary and sur- hyper- realistic fiction, the earliest moments of modern drama, violent Greek commentaries, and really fucked up poems about Georgian farm boys who impregnate sheep. It's metamorphosing (or maybe devolving?) into some type of "meaningful" conclusions about all sorts of things on my part--I mean, the points of all these interconnections. James Dickey constructs a child born to man and sheep and presents it as an expression of human nature's dualized desires and fears of the unknown; Murakami takes emotionally similar Japanese men and turns psychological metahpors into uncanny narratives; Henrik Ibsen creates the female Hamlet in Hedda Gabbler; and Sophocles somehow displaced a tragic hero in an existential world centuries before anyone was even saying "existential." But that's just a laundry list of why I love these writers: I'm getting to the point.
Society shapes literature in the same way literature defines society. It's like one president effecting the next presidential race--just look at the past months of campaigning, George Bush has been mentioned every day by both McCain and Obama. Post-War, post-capitalistic Japan created the need for a Murakami then defined itself by product of that need. Does that make sense? I don't think I clearly expressed that. Let me try again, with a more cool example. On James Dickey's sheep child: the sheep child is pure Dickey, a construction pricking at the puritanical conscience of America by dignifying its deepest taboo.
Do you see what I'm hinting at? I realize as I'm typing I sound like such a pretentious douche bag, but let the awesome-ness of this sink in: a man wrote a poem about beasility fucking and had a substantial message behind it. Social paradigms, just in their rigid being, neccessitated the creation of this sheep-child, and as an argument the poem presents an anti-pastoral depiction of the way shit really went down. Can you do that Neil Gaimon? Fuck no. Fuck you. You suck.
Okay, this is getting a bit long and rant-ish, but it's what I felt like talking about. I might develop this later, or come back and want to delete it after seeing how douchey it all really came off, but hey, it's late and I still have Bio homework. If you walk away from this with anything, it's that you should, if you have time, check out Dickey or Murakami. I highly recommend both.
I don't really know what a typical blog post consists of--personal reactions or more formal responses--but tonight I want to talk about literature, in a more informal matter compared to the likes of World Lit papers or the ACT Writing component (speaking of, wasn't the October ACT rather easy? Feel free to discuss).
Anyway, I've been making the time to read more lately. This is not to say that I have not enjoyed the school required Greek Theatre survey, but I've been making personal time for my buddies Haruki Murakami and Henrik Ibsen (if you're unfamiliar with these guys, you're missing out), and of course interjecting everything I do with a healthy bit of James Dickey and Extended Essay (I realize these parenthical passages are probably really annoying, but James Dickey is another literary badass I urge you to read. If you want to read 3,000 words on his excellent poem "The Sheep Child," just ask. I have no personal qualms with whoring out my Extended Essay). My basic point is that I've been reading a lot lately, and reaching some "lucid" levels of interpretation and analysis. This might sound pretentious, but bear with me.
It's really cool, this splattering of social Japanese commentary and sur- hyper- realistic fiction, the earliest moments of modern drama, violent Greek commentaries, and really fucked up poems about Georgian farm boys who impregnate sheep. It's metamorphosing (or maybe devolving?) into some type of "meaningful" conclusions about all sorts of things on my part--I mean, the points of all these interconnections. James Dickey constructs a child born to man and sheep and presents it as an expression of human nature's dualized desires and fears of the unknown; Murakami takes emotionally similar Japanese men and turns psychological metahpors into uncanny narratives; Henrik Ibsen creates the female Hamlet in Hedda Gabbler; and Sophocles somehow displaced a tragic hero in an existential world centuries before anyone was even saying "existential." But that's just a laundry list of why I love these writers: I'm getting to the point.
Society shapes literature in the same way literature defines society. It's like one president effecting the next presidential race--just look at the past months of campaigning, George Bush has been mentioned every day by both McCain and Obama. Post-War, post-capitalistic Japan created the need for a Murakami then defined itself by product of that need. Does that make sense? I don't think I clearly expressed that. Let me try again, with a more cool example. On James Dickey's sheep child: the sheep child is pure Dickey, a construction pricking at the puritanical conscience of America by dignifying its deepest taboo.
Do you see what I'm hinting at? I realize as I'm typing I sound like such a pretentious douche bag, but let the awesome-ness of this sink in: a man wrote a poem about beasility fucking and had a substantial message behind it. Social paradigms, just in their rigid being, neccessitated the creation of this sheep-child, and as an argument the poem presents an anti-pastoral depiction of the way shit really went down. Can you do that Neil Gaimon? Fuck no. Fuck you. You suck.
Okay, this is getting a bit long and rant-ish, but it's what I felt like talking about. I might develop this later, or come back and want to delete it after seeing how douchey it all really came off, but hey, it's late and I still have Bio homework. If you walk away from this with anything, it's that you should, if you have time, check out Dickey or Murakami. I highly recommend both.
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Some words, of sorts
Before anything else: hello, and welcome. Presently, I don't think I have any readers on -this- blog, but since blogger.com made me create my own deal before joining the Hemoblogin team I thought I'd rock it out. So, if you're out there reading this, welcome, and I do hope you enjoy. I have no concrete plans or grander schemes for this, my own little section of the internet, but I suspect it'll become, or devolve, into a splattering of the stuff running through my head. I am not consciously deciding to be overtly "anything" with blog, except myself. *Deep breath* Alright, let's proceed.
I titled this blog "Consumption Without Digestion" because, well, I think it's a phrase that sums up so many things so perfectly. Think about it. Think about going a week on the cheese cube diet then sitting down with a pile of Baconators. With a gallon of Frostie. Imagine all the proverbial grease dripping down your chin onto your Che Guevera shirt and then some Frostie getting all over your new Levi's. And then, unbeknownst to you, none of this is absorbed. The carbohydrates roll right off your tongue into some not-stomach. This hyper-generalized/ borderline-cliched metaphor is exactly the sort of thing I see, and am victim too, pretty often. It felt appropriate for a blog title, albeit a bit obviously critical. That last sentence makes me sound like a cop-out--okay, alright, so I did mean it to be obviously critical. I did something intentional--well crap. Anyway, in the spirit of expediency and this newly born blog, let's move along. You get the idea--you're well-informed. More to come on the binary at some point, but let's move along.
Anyway, this is my blog, and you are my audience (which is non-existent at the present). To repeat myself, I do blog on the Hemoblogin board (which you should all go read!) so this might get neglected from time to time, but hey--I'm giving man-birth to a digital tome of whatever I am. When I figure what that is, or why this is here, taking up space on a gently humming server somewhere in one of the seven continents, I'll let you know. Until then, there's autumn to enjoy and work to do, so stay safe, and I'll be back in no time.
I titled this blog "Consumption Without Digestion" because, well, I think it's a phrase that sums up so many things so perfectly. Think about it. Think about going a week on the cheese cube diet then sitting down with a pile of Baconators. With a gallon of Frostie. Imagine all the proverbial grease dripping down your chin onto your Che Guevera shirt and then some Frostie getting all over your new Levi's. And then, unbeknownst to you, none of this is absorbed. The carbohydrates roll right off your tongue into some not-stomach. This hyper-generalized/ borderline-cliched metaphor is exactly the sort of thing I see, and am victim too, pretty often. It felt appropriate for a blog title, albeit a bit obviously critical. That last sentence makes me sound like a cop-out--okay, alright, so I did mean it to be obviously critical. I did something intentional--well crap. Anyway, in the spirit of expediency and this newly born blog, let's move along. You get the idea--you're well-informed. More to come on the binary at some point, but let's move along.
Anyway, this is my blog, and you are my audience (which is non-existent at the present). To repeat myself, I do blog on the Hemoblogin board (which you should all go read!) so this might get neglected from time to time, but hey--I'm giving man-birth to a digital tome of whatever I am. When I figure what that is, or why this is here, taking up space on a gently humming server somewhere in one of the seven continents, I'll let you know. Until then, there's autumn to enjoy and work to do, so stay safe, and I'll be back in no time.
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