waste

I have a favorite passage from The Recognitions

To wit, this one, though I'm also partial to that one description of the dude's face.  You know the one. About Benny, pp 600–2—the sameparty, actually. (Or perhaps the bit where Esme, amid squalor and possibly in love, puts on Camilla's earrings.) And I seem to be capable of blathering on about em dashes and their multifarious ways of combination.  Sadly, I do not have byline-granting powers, nor do I even know any Jersey girls outfitted with the requisite pedal pushers and lollipops*, neither in the wilds of Brooklyn nor anywhere else.

While it's doubtless a shame to be mired and immured in an odious scene, perhaps the burden could have been somewhat eased had the author taken to heart that old Pythagorean catechism, which she could have read in Gaddis' last work: Pleasure is in all circumstances bad; for we came here to be punished and we ought to be punished (25–6, though the last bit recurs passim)—the Pythagoreans no doubt thinking that "here" would be "this world", but maybe willing to accept NYU or NYC as suitable microcosmoi.

I have to assume that the actual Gaddis content of this party and walk thereto was actually smaller than Jessica makes it out to be; it's not uncommon for something like that, which seems unlikely and notable to someone who already feels on the outside, to be made into an emblem and have its frequency correspondingly overestimated. (Or maybe Gaddis is acting metonymically for general snootiness.) But if the strategic conversation among literary frenemies at a rich guy's house in a hip part of town really did concern itself with The Recognitions—well, that would be a little too too, wouldn't it?

* In the original of "Heartattack and Vine", Tom Waits says "suckin' on a soda-pop"; John Hammond emends to "lollipop" in his generally superior cover. I observe: it is happy that "lollipop" and "lolita" begin with more or less the same phonemes, in the same order.

I should have asked a professional from the get-go

Whole white corn kernels!

No one respects the forbiddenness of the old bestandings anymore

I would read a book titled, after Buford's Among the Thugs, Down Among the Unclefts, chronicling dissipation and disrespect in whatever curious subculture the unclefts might represent in this context.

From the annals of overenthusiastic label blurbs

A previous entry showed how increasing the vocabulary at the writer's disposal correspondingly increases his ability to make present again in the mind of the reader the music on the pitted disc, all in advance of its being heard; the latest suggests a strategy for artfully-constructed comparison classes in which one's offering is quite obviously eligendissimum: "Without doubt the greatest ever disc of shakuhachi and ney duets …".

WELL THANK FUCKING GOD! I can't tell you how many mediocre shakuhachi and ney duets I've suffered through; the CDs stack up a full foot high.

A patriotic gesture

The other day Nathan reported the curious fact that if one swallows a blueberry whole, it will pass integral through one's tract, plopping out the other end not very much the worse for wear, its coloration in particular intact; I then (or perhaps first?) relayed my sister's claim that if one eats a sufficient quantity of red beets, one's shit will be, at some future point, red itself (certainly in peeling them one's hands become red enough the multitudinous seas to incarnadine). This suggested to some—in particular, to someone who doesn't even know how to pronounce his own name, though he wasn't nearly as enthusiastic about the idea as weas I—imagine how I felt being shown up in such a fashion!—that all that was lacking was a way to get a bit of white in the mix, and one would have all and only the colors of the American flag.  (Also all and only the colors of any number of other flags, but one can't be pickier than one's medium allows.)

The question is, what substance can perform this vital service?  Nathan suggested titanium dioxide, but I wonder whether a sufficient quantity to make a difference would still be safe to consume. Also, of course, it's important that the white neither overpower the red entirely, nor dilute it to a pusillanimous pink; streaks of white in the red are what's wanted.

In other words, it's a complicated task, and that's why I'm not doing it this year.  That, and it's almost certainly too late by now to get NEA funding.

Stars fell on Alabama

Being given the impetus by a hot cat to look at a book called Wandering Significance, which I at first thought might have to do with hiking, I checked it out of the library and was in short order won over by, not the author's philosophical positions, which I have in the main yet to discern, but his writing style, which has a pleasing bagginess and high-flownness in places.  (How easy it is to win me over by such means! & how quickly am I turned off by either dry-as-dust prose or the smugness and satisfaction I perceive in places in the likes of Danto and Davidson—the section of The Transfiguration of the Commonplace in which the former explains how Lichtenberg couldn't possibly have been a plagiarist is a decent example in his case. It is possibly the case that one oughtn't be guided in philosophical matters by aesthetic considerations, and if I did that, it is possibly also the case that I'd have to join Quine and his desert landscapes—but then, is it not also precisely the case that possibly one should do nothing but? Weighty questions indeed.) Of course there are perils in grandiloquence too; one might be tempted, riding high and not caring what trouble one incurs, to try an unknown path, and suffer deflection, in the form, perhaps, of misspelling a five-dollar word beyond one's means: "filagree", say, for "filigree", on p 7.  (Does no one edit anymore?) Or one's metaphors may become confusingly overwrought: Some of this appetite undoubtedly derives simply from the inertia that keeps old doctrines aloft even after they have become detached from the bow from which they were originally sprung (xiv)—quite right, old bean, and I'd be willing to overlook the, hmmm, excessively poetical "sprung" there if not for that odd "detached": an arrow isn't attached to a bow in the first place—how would you shoot it?—and it isn't, when sprung therefrom, detached, either, but rather shot, loosed, released, aut cetera.  (And why would appetite derive from that inertia?)

Further in: it is probably best not to assert that e^2πi+1=0, when actually it equals two.  It is e^πi plus one that equals zero. Confidence is not inspired in such wise.

What I did on my summer vacation

I saw several specimens of the Sellars' Jay, a bird whose plumage has the unusual property of looking blue even though it is actually green.

I also went to three waterfalls, climbing up slippery rocks near to the lips of (parts of) two of them, and over the lip of the third (that one stairs); saw some of the oldest living things on the planet; was surprisingly affected by an internment camp in an apple orchard; saw two lakes from a local maximum not very far beneath the spires of Cathedral Peak, and preferred the barren rock to them; played chess near a third lake while being swarmed by mosquitoes; experienced an excitingly high pulse; walked into a tree; saw Half Dome and ducks in crepuscular half-light, jumped into a freezing cold river and thought, immediately on getting out, "that wasn't so bad" and did it again in a cycle that may have repeated endlessly if someone hadn't hoven into view; dismissed a lovely view as too picture-postcard; and walked only halfway up Mt. Whitney, having turned back after about five and a half miles and three thousand feet, which is probably not bad for someone who is basically sedentary and underwent no preparation that can't be had from REI.  I also told this joke (with revised punchline as suggested) and look forward to telling it again.

I return with at least 60 bug bites on my shoulders and back, and a little bag in which one can shit if no place else is handy, but no photographs, since my camera battery apparently doesn't work, though I anticipate the photographs of my more aerobically accomplished companions.

Things said to me recently

1. it's like you're fagin or something … he was a grasping miserable jew who made other people miserable.

2. Dissertations are to me what cocks are to you. (this one isn't verbatim.)

Hey man nice shot

Grim fucking flick, though.

I seem to have lost my knife

Such Truths certainly involve a basic decision - the choice whether or not to go down that road - but once you make the basic decision to follow that path, to try to make some unattainable idea true in musical practice, it's no longer a question of mere random preference, but it becomes a question of logic - of a new, unforeseeable logic that you unfold by working on it. Preference is simply too weak a word, too suggestive of whim, for what it means to make decisions of that order. Again using Badiou's terminology, if you admit some such Truth, you are 'faithful' to it - which is for Badiou exactly the only way to achieve subjectivity! (his notion of subjectivity is a little more abstract than most folks' - a subject is not a person, but is a process of fidelity to a truth that persons can subscribe to; a subject is something you partake in, not something that you are; if you're not engaged in some such truth, you're basically living some sort of animal life, just prolonging your existence while working, watching tv and paying off your mortgage etc.)

So sez Samuel Vriezen in a comment to a post by Kyle Gann on John Cage.  If you remove that "decision" claptrap from the beginning, you're left with something rather familiar, n'est-ce pas?

Elsewhere on Gann's blog: sweet ink, man.