waste

To write with sensibility requires more than tears and moonlight

one; two.

Was ist es denn mit den Gehirnen? Warum schmecken sie so gut?

I present to you the zombie modernism concept of a friend of mine:

Well, as I'm sure you know, the advent of post-modernism as such is coeval with the advent of zombies.
But as we all know post-modernism is a retread of modernism is a retread of Romanticism.
So why not rewrite classic works of modernism (or even Romanticism) in which key figures are zombies?

(I thought the argument would be that post-modernism is zombie modernism is zombie romanticism, but evidently not.)  He gives examples: "For instance: "Stately, bold [sic] Buck Mulligan... BRAINS!" That could be Ulysses.  Benn's "Gehirne" could probably stay the same.".  I think it's a great idea!  One could start with Manfred, because, after all, does not Manfred desire to eat BRAINS—namely, his own brains, and the memories they contain?

Friendly old hippies: yea or nay?

We shall put to one side the question of hippy composition and consider in its stead the question of compositions played by hippies, or those whom one might take once to have been hippies, such as is the venerable Peter Walker, whom I saw perform, having been opened for by Jack Rose and the surprisingly nonsucky Alps (who, by dint of projecting stuff onto a screen while they played, reminded me of the guy I saw who opened crosslegged sitarwise for Rick Bishop in the summer of 2004, whose projected stuff included scenes of a JZ Smith maybe 10-15 years younger than he then was smoking on the quads of Chicago, thereby casting me into a state of melancholic navelgazing from which I have yet to emerge fully, as evidenced by this entire parenthetical).

I admit to being somewhat put off by the friendly old man-ness of Peter Walker!  I liked what he played a lot, but it seemed as if he wanted the crowd to like him—he'd occasionally look up and smile in a way that I, probably quite uncharitably, interpreted as a plea for approval from the crowd.  (It didn't help that his inter-song stories were awkwardly old-manly.  And from an old man, no less!)  I was expecting more reserved dignity.  But of course it's totally possible that he's just ingenuously a nice hippyish old dude who was behaving more or less unselfconsciously, which, officially, is exactly how I'd have things, and I just don't like being reminded of the indignities of age (walking slowly, forgetting where one put one's pick, etc).

The body-body problem

What does one do on returning, intoxicated, from a party?  Why, try to get something using mod_rewrite to work (and succeed!), of course.

A paradoxical realization

If I didn't like Cavafy's poem "Before Time Could Change Them", I would absolutely detest, abominate, and odiate it. (It is reproduced below in a translation the author of which I can't recall if'n you want to see it.)

Unrelated quasi-update: I would love to read this article.

Also unrelated: there should be a band called Fronting Fellers Union Local 242.

Since this life is no more than an evanescent point of time, I find it incomprehensible that the state of unending bliss and glory does not begin at once.

Lots of brewers make holiday beers, most commonly (only?) Christmas ales.  Why not expand, though, to other areas?  Belgian brewers, for instance, could make a special Halloween lambic, flavored with a nut popular throughout Asia: a betel geuze.

Thursday meta-hatred

I had an epiphany today, concerning the transcendence of the hated qua hated, or, if you like, the necessary inadequacy of all hatred.  We already know under the general schema of transcendence that in whatever is intended-to there is more than is present in it as intended-to in whatever fashion; that there are certain aspects that escape our experience (presently, that is; these aspects need not be beyond our experience in principle—but in whatever way we experience something, there will be facets that are inexperienced, that lie beyond the current horizon of experience).  In some cases we can say some things about what we are not currently experiencing; for instance, if we see a tree, we will expect that its far, currently unobserved side will exhibit some features consistent with the observed side (though of course this is corrigible).  In hatred, however, we have a stronger result: whatever it is that is currently unexperienced in the object intended to hatefully, we can be certain that it too is hateful.  There is, in even the most mundane of hated things, always more to be hated; thus we see that while the common expression that one hates some X "with all one's being" is, owing to the transcendence of the  self, flawed*, that one hates all the being of some X is much closer to the truth.  (Did I not say above that the inadequacy of all hatred is itself necessary?  Yes, I did, meaning by this however that the experienced hatred is necessarily inadequate, as there is always more to hate—however, constitutively, whatever more there is is hateful.  One does not at any time hate all the being of the intended-to but one can be confident that there is no nonhateful component.)

*In the case of self-hatred this may not be true.  In general I think that the doctrine of the transcendence of the hated for self-hatred is of paramount importance.

Friedrich Schlegel on why Joanna Newsom sucks

Naïve is what is or seems to be natural, individual, or classical to the point of irony, or else to the point of continuously fluctuating between self-creation and self-destruction.  If it's simply instinctive, then it's childlike, childish, or silly; if it's merely intentional, then it gives rise to affectation.

Though I hear her new album is supposed to be interesting, and I haven't actually heard the first, only a single live performance.

Therefore he ought to have more than one stomach

What causes flatulence and is frequently put into coffee?

Rebaked beans.

Wem soll ich mein neues gerade mit einem Bimssteinchen aufgeglättetes Büchlein schenken?*

Profiting from the downfall of others: A four-cd set containing all of Berio's works for solo instruments (sequenzae, alternate sequenzae, and pieces not otherwise grouped into, shall we call them, groups) for 30-some dollars?  Thank you, Tower Records!  (I also got some stuff by Toru Takemitsu, a piece by Kyle Gann, Die Winterreise, and Das Lied von der Erde with contributions by the grande dame of Lieder, Fischer-Dieskau—I tried but failed to remember this guy's name—and then later today I listened to Uri Caine's first Mahler album with a piece from DLvdE sung cantor-wise and it was great.)  I am slightly concerned that my impression of Berio has been colored by my intial exposure to him's having been extremely viola-centric, an instrument whose charms please me in the strictly Kantian sense.  Alex Ross asked, prompted by Tower's fall (first person ever to make that joke right here!  Now with extra reflection on its possible post–everything's changed impropriety!), why Manhattan can't have a good independent record store.  (Actually he asks why NYC can't have one, and then slides right into considering Manhattan rents.  Classy.)  But this is absurd, since both Other Music and the Downtown Music Gallery are in Manhattan, and the latter even has a classical section.  I wouldn't be surprised if somewhere in Brooklyn, wherever that is, there's at least one other decent independent store.

Shocking but true: I am down with Friedrich Schlegel.  Feast your eyes on some Athanæum Fragments:

32. One should have wit, but not want to have it.  Otherwise, you get persiflage, the Alexandrian style of wit.

53.  It's equally fatal for the mind to have a system and to have none.  It will simply have to decide to combine the two.

Too right.  Others of the fragments are positively Lichtenbergian, which does him no harm at all in my estimation.  Both of these above, it seems to me, say more or less the same thing; if only there were appended to the second one the sentence "Thus, you're fucked.", it would lack nothing.

* It turns out that I have badly misremembered how this line actually goes, but I leave the title as it stands as a testament to the creative element in memory.  Also, I have no idea if "aufglätten", which doesn't seem to be a word, can mean something like "polish up"; I always want to use "auf" to turn a verb into its up-form, but I really don't know if that's the done thing.  Though one of the entries for "auf" as a prefix in my word book suggests it might at least be comprehensible: "drückt aus, dass j-d/etw. in den Zustand gebracht wird od. kommt, den das Adjektive bezeichnet, von dem das Verb abgeleitet ist".

Materials science

Super glue is so called because of its adhesive properties.  Getting it on your fingers is unadvisable.

The cut ends of steel wire are sharp.  Getting them in your fingers is unadvisable.