waste

What we've got here, we've got multiple items here

1. Some people just make me sick. There's this one guy who I think lives near me, I see him all the time, and whenever I see him he's walking really slowly and just LOOKING at people. At EVERYONE. How can people LIVE like that?
2. Bitsy24: I'm there for you
3. I really need to start changing more filters. All filters need to be changed at some point, but I haven't changed a filter, in like forever.

cruor nucis—fux0r!

I had the beginnings of a post written, but decided it would be bad.  But now that I've got the title I can't help but want to post something with it.  Ironically the post I had started was to involve using something that you know is sub-par because it's still good enough that you want to display that you thought of it, even if you couldn't get it right.  (The vehicle was to be the joke whose punchline is "rectum?  Damn near killed 'im!".)  So, there you go: cruor nucis—fux0r!

[blah blah blah: One upshot of all this is that, since I intended to link to this bizarre thing by Stephen Will Tanner (though he hardly knows 'er) in the abandoned post, it was at the very forefront of my cerebellum at a certain opportune moment elsewhere, with the result that languagehat has linked to me, woo. And I have been looking through the David Delaney's archive of interesting ark posts, including To Lacaille's Land by Telephene, an episode of Scientifiction Playhouse, Lap Dissolve, and an instance of trilining, that most rarefied of art forms. Ah, memories of newsreaders. Too bad I've been out of the ark loop for a long time now.]

43-Man Squamous

A quotation from The Three-Cornered World:

Counting how many times others break wind is a policy of personal attack to which farting itself is a legitimate means of defense.

Truer words were never writ.

A wondering wabout words.

We say "stereotypical" and "prototypical", not "stereotypal" or "prototypal".  Why then do we say not "archetypical" but "archetypal"?

What are the rewards of virtue?

In heaven, you gain the ability to eat numberless dried apricots without experiencing spewful crappings. 

The difference between man-magma and man-lava

Ably explained.

So, about this war you are having with the Megalons, how is that working out?

Why don't I have dreams like this?  (Stolen from TDR.)

As may have been apparent from my recent posts, I have been suffering from crippling insomnia for the past month or so. The good news is, yesterday night I finally got caught up on sleep!! Had this fucking amazing dream to celebrate. It was this sort of combination of American Idol and Anne Rice and Gladiator and Art Forum.

   

And Iron Chef. Always Iron Chef.

!

By the time he was seventeen, he had been trained to withstand a full-force strike to the groin. He can lick red-hot iron shovels, break bricks with his skull, fly aboveground upside down in full splits, and sleep standing on one leg.

This idea not for stealing

I envision a product so mighty that it can only be crafted by the masters who labor in the workshops of Hammacher Schlemmer, marketed by the journeymen who forge hot copy into seductive ads for the readers of the SkyMall catalogue, and purchased by apprentices starting off on the long road of life in these or any other united states.  Imagine, if you can, a bag such as is worn by the godless young people of today.  Not quite as large as a messenger bag, it nevertheless hangs by a single strap over a single shoulder.  Superadd to the strap slots to accomodate the placement of chips of many colors, red white blue and more if need be, though not to an excessive quantity (practicality is yet wanted, and accomodations for dice and a deck of cards to be strapped to the strapping strap).  A rigid side to the sack (that which faces thighward) allows for the playing of games of chance and skill, and within the lining, Hoyle's Rules of Games in miniature, and a magnifying glass.  Call it The Gambolier - a bandolier for the gamboling gambler.

I feel that I should not be doing this

But I cannot stop myself. Curse you, fair Anthony.

1. You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451; which book do you want to be?
   Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban.
2. Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?
   Hahaha.  All of my crushes are on fictional characters.
3. The last book you bought is:
   Three-Cornered World by Natsume Soseki and The Highroad around Modernism by Robert Neville (know nothing about him but the cover was garish, so...)
4. The last book you read:
   Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey.
5. What are you currently reading?
   Actually: Three-Cornered World.  Theoretically: that, and The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico by Croce and The Faerie Queene by Spenser.
6. Five books you would take to a desert island:
   Now, the approaches people take here puzzle me.  Is it to be presumed that you're going to be rescued in a reasonable amount of time, or are you going to be there for the rest of your days?  Because if the latter, I don't understand why people would say they'd want to bring all these intellectually compelling or interesting books, since reading them would naturally (I presume) lead you to want to discuss them with others, or read other books they reference, or seek to refine your understanding, or something like that.  But that would just make your isolation all the more intolerable.  And how much time or inclination would you really have for contemplating the eternal after a long day seeing to your basic necessities?  Maybe you'd have lots, but I imagine I'd want to spend a lot of my time doing such things as sleeping.  (Though one hears of solitaries accompanying themselves solely with a volume of Horace, say.)  Same thing for the maximizers of length—yeah, you could bring the unabridged Golden Bough, Proust, A Dance to the Music of Time, that long series by C. P. Snow, the Oxford English Dictionary, and Goethe's collected works, but the best use you'd get is shelter, I think (maybe heat).  So here's what I'd bring:
   1. The complete Calvin & Hobbes
   2. The complete Pogo
   3. The complete Peanuts
   4. The complete works of Thomas Browne
   5. Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman (this one was even more arbitrary than the others)
7. I apparently supposed to designate three people to answer these questions in their own turn, but ... I'll pass.

Why does Dr. Pepper come in Mr. Pibb?

I'm sure I have no idea what you're talking about.

Goings on about town

Today I heard Kyle Bruckmann's Wrack, on Monday I heard the Singleman Affair and Sir Richard Bishop, and two days before that, Josephine Foster, Akron/Family, and the Angels of Light.  And they were all good.  In fact, Wrack, Bishop and Akron/Family were fantastic.  It was hard to imagine Bishop as being part of anything remotely like the Sun City Girls—he's balding and had a grey goatee and looked like he belonged in a café (which is to say he looked very appropriate for what he was playing: Djangoesque, slightly Spanish and Arabian-influenced jazz solo guitar).  When he did play an SCG song, Horse Cock Phepner, it was like your dad belting out a song that was popular when he was your age.  Weird, but not as weird as Anton Hatwich, whom I previous said looked very bass-player, looking, in a collared shirt, creased pants and no cap, a lot like Matt Damon.  Very disconcerting to see the talented Mr. Ripley really getting into a bass line.  Just about as weird as imagining the vaguely nebbishy Kyle Bruckmann being in Lozenge, though (one wonders why I take such account of appearances).

The point of all this, though, is that the Singleman Affair—a babyfaced dude who keened melodiously while accompanying himself on guitar and sitar (no lie, a sitar.  He was wearing what may well have been a tie-dyed shirt)—had a video projection going on during the performance.  The video had a kind of Bill Morrison/Guy Maddin feel to it, and at one point there was a scene from the U of C quads ... depicting J. Z. Smith (aka the smartest man alive) having a contemplative exhalation of cigarette smoke.  It must have been a while ago since he was standing more or less upright.  Surprisingly jarring!  What made it weirder was that while walking to the Empty Bottle I had been thinking about what it would be like to have left and have memories of, and return some time later to, Chicago (Western, being a wide street, is well suited to being looked down contemplatively—distant lights and the sounds of cars passing and whatnot), and then I was presented for about a minute with grainy, slightly jumpy footage, to basically nostalgic music, of an old man I strongly associate with the U of C.

He wore a daffodil tucked into the band of his hat and told me that it's terrible to grow old.

I'm all overcome. Nerdy in excelsis. I'm amazed that I could recognize many of the characters based on their abilities in battle.

I'm pretty sure I still have my SNES and PlayStation, with games and maybe even controllers, in California. Maybe even the original Nintendo too.

I am a neko wafer

At long last, I have acquired a copy of Natsume Soseki's Three-Cornered World, ak, unless I misremember, a both Grass Pillow (the translation of the Japanese title) and An Inhuman Journey, or maybe Tour (the title of a different translation into English, if it exists). You might now be thinking to yourself, but listen, there is, in just the previous sentence, no great distance, a link to the book being sold online, and for cheap, too. Why then is it so remarkable to have gotten a copy? Why would have confined yourself to looking in every bookstore, used and otherwise (for this book is out of print), every time you enter one, for a copy, as if one would have appeared since the last time you were there? Why go to the length, surely great, of suggesting it in a half-assed manner for resuscitation by New York Review Books? Why do all this when you could have bought it online, no fuss, no muss? The answer to your questions is, "fuck you".

I have been on the trail, diligently if not practically, of this book for about a year, since reading about it in Artistic Detachment in Japan and the West (a very poorly-written book, btw; you can see the seams where it was stitched together from separate pieces which might once have stood free, and there's a lot of redundancy as a result), where the author raves about it time and again. Finally saw it today in Myopic Books as a part of the ritual Bookstore Dance: Do they have John Crowley's Aegypt (no, but they do have Daemonomania, which I got in Palo Alto—and I see now Crowley's got a new book coming out in June). Do they have Grass Pillow ... amazingly, yes. Rawk.

Hella grass all living in the interstices

According to Steve Schultz, there is a street gang in Japan named "Street Gang".  At last, clarity!  Someone tell Ernst Jünger.

I fear this may be sage advice

There's an easy 3-step solution to living in the bay area which I'm in the process of perfecting. I've been here for a month and this has really helped. Just do these in order:

1. Lower your standards
2. Repeat step 1
3. You're screwed

Guy Maddin is coming to the University of Chicago

Like phwoarg, man!  (It is necessary to scroll down.)  And to think that earlier today I was reminiscing about how cool Dracula: Pages from the Virgin's Diary was, and being frustrated that I couldn't remember the name of the director.  (Conveniently writing that sentence has reminded me of another task unperformed, connected to why I was thinking about the movie in the first place.)  And now I will get to see it!  Again!  Good thing it's only about five hours long!

This post exists solely so I won't forget.

A contest 3: a resulting

Adam Kotsko wins, with four votes, proving once and for all the enduring power of the five-paragraph essay.  The runners-up are: Anne and ogged, with three votes; Yami (who I had referred to as green gabbro) and c with two, Anti-Anti Kamala and Michael with 1.5, and Thane, bitch phd and jenniebee with 1.  [Also Dave got 1 vote.  I guess I should have waited until voting had unambiguously ceased to write this post, huh?]

Adam, gracious in victory, castigated the voting panel for failing to understand the premise of the contest (observing that had they so understood, they would have voted otherwise), received the prize—Glory—at 9:35 and 18 seconds pm (central).  He remarked that "you go with the voting public you have".

It should be noted that Adam was the only entrant to vote for himself.

Ha ha!  Actually the above was all lies!  Read more for more.

A contest 2: a voting

All told there were ten [twelve now] entries.  There should have been more, but someone (named dave zacuto) didn't enter in time.

The entries are:

1. An untitled effort from green gabbro (actually written by googletalk)
2. Und Zeit by ogged
3. Time and Measurement Through History by a Michael
4. An untitled effort by Thane Plambeck
5. Essay this! by Anti-Anti Kamala
6. Technology for the Modern Era by Bitch PhD
7. An untitled effort by Adam Kotsko
8. Yet another untitled essay by Anne
9. No title here either by sundre
10. This, too, lacks a title by the mysterious c. Note that this starts with a non-approved sentence.  Bitch PhD suggests that this might merit extra credit, as an imitation of a student not following directions.
11. A new entry!  Here,by Dave.
12. Here is another tardy entry, by jenniebee.  She will be docked a full grade.

Vote in the comments.  I was going to use one of those blogpoll-type polls for voting, but it fux0red up the style of the page something fierce.  It's true that this way will require manual counting by me, but that will just make it easier to ensure that the one I want to win does.

...the day

Not quite a "you'll never believe what some idiot said" story, but I like this anecdote (told by Edward Gorey in a book of interviews with him):

The party was very strange, There were very few people from the ballet there, like five people.  I had gotten invited on the strength of having done the invitations and stuff.  Anyway, everybody was standing around, and I said in one of my best loud flippant voices, "Who are all these people, do you suppose?"  There was this middle-aged lady, whose husband came up and said, "Oh, well, listen, we're old friends of Allegra's."  I made it worse; I said, "Well, I didn't mean you."

An observation

This is a masterpiece, Josephine Foster is nervous on stage, Akron/Family is great live though nothing like their album, M. Gira is stentorian, lamb is good.

From Brig o' Dread when thou mayst pass

There are as many reasons for getting scurvy as there are people with scurvy.

Alkaline

I've given up on the proposition that post titles serve to do anything other than distinguish posts from one another; in particular, on the proposition that they should have any relationship to the contents of the posts aside from identifying them, hopefully uniquely.  (Although actually this particular title does fit this paragraph well, if obliquely.)

This is a cranky but good post about secondary literature/scholarship in literature depts.  I think it would be better if he talked more about the idea that scholarship is creative of knowledge in itself and not just illuminative, and I can't really agree with this:

(As much as I dislike the way in which literature has been removed from the study of literature, I can’t agree that the audience for scholarship lies in the “general” public. There’s ultimately nothing wrong with the fact that “secondary literature in the humanities” is necessarily written for the benefit of other scholars.)

Sub "general public that cares about literature" for "general public simpliciter", and I presume you'd find an audience that actually would like some interesting scholarship not available solely in hard-to-access journals or expensive monographs that their bookstores don't stock.  Furthermore, I can't see the production of scholarship solely for other scholars, divorced from public life or any kind of public intellectual scene (by which I don't mean a scene in which Public Intellectuals go about doing their thing, but an intellectualism in daily life sort of thing) as anything but pernicious.

This, though—this is secondary literature I can get behind.  "The Definitive Guide to Simple Syrup"?  "The Genealogy and Mythology of the Singapore Sling"?  Fuck yeah.

Dear NYU

You know I love you, so why you gotta do me like you do?

A contest

Since the beginning of time, the human landscape has been characterized by mutual strife and striving, whether warring on the martian field or playing ultimate frisbee on Mars Hills College's campus.  We see it before the high walls of Troy, at the funeral games of Patroclus, every year at the Big Game (go Cal!), and now here, too.

Yes, that's right!  I, in concert with Bitch PhD and with the gracious permission of Rudbeckia Hirta, am having a writing contest of sorts.  Hosting, really, since I won't be doing any of the judging or any of that kind of shit.

Here's the basic idea.  Write an essay starting with either sentence two or four from this post of Hirta's.  Let's say it should be no more than ... two pages.  Let's call it 500 words.  That's about 1.5 pages at 12 points of Computer Modern with LaTeX's default margins.  Maybe it can be around 750 words.  Let's be honest, no one's going to count.  Anyone who writes, in response to Beginning Sentence Two, a brief history of the attempt to measure longitude and its solution with the invention of accurate naval chronometers will be summarily shot.

Essays essayed, the enblogged can post it to their blogs and include a link back here or use the trackback mechanism or make a note in the comments or some such.  The disenblogged, or those who don't want to sully the purity of their blogs with this kind of drivel, can email me their entries and I'll post them in some fashion.

You should do all of this by the 18th of April, by which time I will have set my life on some kind of alterable and doubtless regrettable course, and on which date there will be a VOTE! AMONG! the ENTRIES!  The winner will receive Glory, by which I mean, "maybe I'll ask someone who knows how to do that kind of thing to make some kind of button-like image, and then you, the winner, can display that button-like image as your fancy dictates".

Ok?  Ok.

UN-altered REPRODUCTION and DISSEMINATION of this IMPORTANT Information is ENCOURAGED, ESPECIALLY to COMPUTER BULLETIN BOARDS.

[Update on the 18th: In fact the voting or whatever will be tomorrow.  I'm about to go out, and most of the entries have come in today anyway.]
[Update on the 19th: Vote here.]

Here are some quotations from Georg Lichtenberg.

I share because I love.

Our false philosophy is incorporated in our entire language; we can, so to speak, not reason without reasoning falsely.  We fail to consider that speaking, regardless of what, is a philosophy ... Our whole philosophy is a rectification of colloquial linguistic usage, thus rectification of a philosophy, and indeed of the most universal and general ...

The noble simplicity in the works of nature only too often originates in the noble shortsightedness of him who observes it.

There are many people who read simply to prevent thimselves from thinking.

A pure heart and a clean shirt.  (A pure heart is an excellent thing, and so is a clean shirt.)

The great also make mistakes, and some of them make so many you are almost tempted to think they weren't great at all.

I could do this shit for hours.

Freedom, horrible freedom

I got some free books!

• The Novices of Sais by Novalis
• Past Imperfect by Peter Charles Hoffer. Mine has a different subtitle: "Facts, Fictions, and Fraud in the Writing of American History".
• A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit
• On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins for some reason
• Television by Jean-Philippe Toussaint
• Faceless Killers by Henning Mankell

The blurb on the back of Television begins:

The self-possessed protagonist and narrator of Jean-Philippe Toussaint's novel is an academic on sabbatical in Berlin.  He plans to write a groundbreaking study of Titian, but after a couple of months, all he's completed is "When Musset."  He blames his obsession with watching TV for preventing him from writing more, so he decides to stop watching television all together (after the end of the Tour de France, of course).

How quaint.  When's this Toussaint guy going to write Internet?

Why is 6 afraid of 7?

Wasn't this kind of tripe formerly reserved for the hallowed pages of the Sunday Magazine?

A concert

Hey, check this out.  You'll have to scroll down to the entry for the eighth, or possibly up to the entry for the eighth of April.  Soon enough that entry won't even be on the page anymore, but that's the way of the world.  (See my forthcoming paper "Permalinks and the Denial of Death" for a discussion of this phenomenon.)  Notice that Anton Hatwich (who looks very bassist, even if his name is very "I am reading a book by Georges Bataille, and my millinery would delight if placed between bread") is double-booked.  One wonders what Nate Lepine and Frank Rosaly did, since he was at the Ice Factory at least between 9 and 1130.  As was I!  Adam Kotsko was there too, but that was last August.  (Last August is also when Anthony said he'd marry Johanna—don't tell his wife!)

I don't have anything to say about this concert thing except that the banjo-cello duo (the "electronics" in this case meant "we're using amps") was surprisingly amazing.  Tim Daisy, who is, it seems, the leader of the Festival Quartet (who were also good, but not totally rawkin!!!), remarked before his group started playing that they sounded like they'd been playing together for a while, and: he was right, they did sound that way.  Plus the banjo player's name is "Uncle Woody Sullender".  Uncle Woody.  The possibilities are literally staggering—I'm pretty sure I'm doing my back permanent damage just contemplating them. Add to that a venue in which the performance area shares space with a washer and dryer, and you get, uh, something or other.  An unknown quantity, to be called X in accord with tradition!

You must change your life

(alternate title: "A normally self-shooting action".) Warning: to read this post is to witness explicit omphaloskepsis; those under the age of consent are advised to go elsewhere.  It turns out, too, that attempting to alternate between writing a post not about ninjas and GM Hopkins and actually, you know, doing work is not the best way to write well.

I recently went to Stanford (a big step for the son and grandson of Berkeley attendees) and visited its law school and philosophy department, with largely inconclusive results.  Conclusion: if I wanted to go to either law school or a grad school in philosophy, Stanford would be a good place to do either of those.

You can see how this leaves the larger question unsettled.

I and another prospective student had lunch with Lanier Anderson (whose hair looks much better in real life than it does in that picture) in which the subject of BATTLING TEH FORCES OF EVIL!!!!1! came up (I think in connection with law school).  He said, quite reasonably, that he didn't think philosophy was of much use for that, but did mention an undergraduate course of his on existentialism that he thought was one of the most important courses he taught, because he tried to get his students to think of their lives outside the seemingly determinative possibilities set down by their parents or societal expectations or whatnot (not that he's doing them any favors in so doing: self-reflection is the inhumanity man does to himself, and I'm pretty certain that once you have the notion of a "life", as in a life-plan, and especially if that notion involves any flavor of anything that can be construed as falling under the label "authenticity", you're well and truly fucked).  The next day I asked him why I should come to Stanford, but didn't realize until too late that what I should have asked was, in light of his comment of the previous day about the importance of that one course, what the end of humanistic scholarship is, and why the life of the academic is worth choosing (or at least attempting).  Not just because of the possibility that one will start discussing chmess instead of chess, but because I worry that, at the rarefied level of scholarly journals, chess just is chmess.  It's not just overproduction and academic game-playing that bugs me, but the notion that there is such a thing as scholarship and that it's always worth producing.

On the other hand I can't deny that I do have a genuine interest in philosophy (or aspects thereof, and related areas—I'm sure other disciplines have as wide a spread of subfields as does philosophy, but given the incredibly varied interests just among the admitted students I met, that's hard to credit), and I find baa's oft-repeated advice unsatisfactory, in that what's wanted isn't just colloquy with the past in one's private library but to be part of an intellectual community, and preferably physically.  (I know that expecting graduate school to be intellectual camp is unrealistic, but it seems less unrealistic than expecting Dewey, Cheathem & Howe to be one.)

Also, for a variety of reasons not including weather, Palo Alto is a sub-optimal place to live.

At least if I went to grad school at Stanford and it totally blew goats, I'd be well-situated geographically to apply to this.

The sweetnesse of ninjas

I have a proposition:

(1) Ninjas are sweet.
(2) Robots are sweet.
(3) Yet a robot ninja would not be sweet.

I say a proposition because I take the first two statements to be generally accepted and without need of justification on my part.  It is only the third that I take to be at all controversial—after all, a robot monkey would be sweet.

My primary reason for believing that a robot ninja would not be sweet is that, while it might be impressive from a technical standpoint to create a robot that could perform the feats of the ninja, that which makes the ninja himself worthy of admiration inheres in his being human and, therefore, subject to uncertainty, slipping, etc. The sweetness of the ninja is a reminder of the fact that the condition of man's spirit being found at best is its being flesh-bound, though úncúmberèd through shéer will. When we catch sight of a ninja going about his day-to-day business—say, in his riding of a rolling steady underneath him level grappling hook—our hearts in hiding stir for the dude: the achieve of, the mastery of the ninja dwells in his execution, in his ordinary life, of the extraordinary.  Even when he fails, he fails of necessity in a great attempt, which, if not praiseworthy, at least contains poignancy and pathos; when a robo-ninja falls and galls itself, gashing green circuit boards, there's only the grandeur of shook aluminum.

The condition of the robo-ninja is disenchantment.

The most ridiculous thing ever?

The narcissism of small differences strikes again!

Vodkan we say about Gregory Liszewski? The guy sure knows his vodka. He's the vodka sommelier at the Brasserie Restaurant at the Courtyard by Marriott Warsaw International Airport Hotel. As an expert on Poland's best-distilled [sic] grain spirit, Liszewski can help you make food and vodka pairings while offering insights on the subtle qualities of each drink.

What shall I tell your brother dear, this night when I go home?

I'm going to California until Wednesday.

Hopefully I will not end up dead and in grave laid.

What will become of the arctic circle candy?

Goodbye cruel world!  Hello sexy world!

Pokey rules.