why I love you and why it hurts, why I feel it all the time

and how. i watched ren and stimpy and stimpy is so nice to ren, so nice and squeals with delight, but nothings good, nothings going on, nothings good and going on, nothing much has been good and going on, nothing I can provide for you in this way that we provide for one another, only my love that is gone, that you'll never give me, never ever give me- take it right now away from me, take it away and sit on it like a hunk of cheese, like a movie that nobody will watch fast enough to say anything about, only a few pages into this love that I should have, this one which I was trying to be- holding and holding and expired, expired, minutes left, minutes and smiles with screw on caps, jawbones and eyedice, takes it right outa me, takes everything away,
leaves me without dead leaves to lie in, not even wet, but the smell,
you can't argue with grain, and as much as you dream, the flavor is
discontinuous, even the sweep of your arm could break off, even the sugar in your blood will jingle in the moan of busfare, but who said anything about what to go on and centerfold, centerfold before the gap of god, marionetted, below and perpenticular, away from vertical, eyes and mouth on one hook.
at least there wasn't any clear evidence, i would add

come dimensia aid the night in its progress and searching yes within the mind of another descending but unsure of destination spelunking within the earth the fathoms of heat and mass below us and forever once not yes spherical is forever as far as proximity of objects in the infinitudesof two dimensions in the infinitueds of 5 dimensionsand the sad car even sees companion ship beyond its page this is a novel the mementum of direction third thurd dimension through penetrated in the moment of the word annihilated what delights just colored lips another powder keg displaces the center by trapeze oh the victory of language over man which is the form of grand sublime force the great in the division of myself in myself is evident in the patterns of manness belonging to certainty I will illustrate in the mindling of this writing and your mind these patterns illustrating connected ideas are conjerd by the profit are only the offering of a mystic the volume in the passing of voices only this I can write forgive me and forgive yourself and from a glitter in the memory which I attempt to conjure or struct two etemologies with the tangle and sting of the whole athe numbness and clarity oh is my clarity only in my removal my invested disection the smoothinging along the damp tires wrapping through the space that annihilates me maybe this is the theme to the story the annihilation of myself and the victory of insects below men and above men I'm glad I can finally pick a team in this book don't you hate it when you hate everything in something you try to pretent to want to read I mean you're like jesus christ I must be a fucking numbskull picking a team is so much more practical in the practise of spelling and grammar I'm so ambitious I'm looking back I'm running a race and you're the book I read so I'm an alien in their radar a blip a moon I'm not quite been annihilated by the sunlight quite yet by the brightness of disappearance the cunjunction between existing and nothing is bright is light light before darkness light is the incessant demand and misfortune of the seen of the patterns moving in the shapes of our thoughts fierceness int eh battle through ourselves without the spectacle of violence the spectacle of violence the spectacle of violence even in our distance from other organismization this is the battle against my visual existence even in the air without origin yes to whom do I owe this air? The hounting of the spectacle the moving image yes destroyed impossible reconstructed existense and a teaspoon of intention best arrayed within the always outside of the image the always inside of the sound the third dimunsion of penetration of annihilation between them of course the forth no fifth dimension the line along the lines ok and the the patterns everyday in the morning in the afternoon in the booznin in the quilt of fuck

god bless another exhibition

Between this and thelast page was 24 hours of sleep, sex, motion, digestion, spectation, the final silence in the great abundance of the world no wordlessness, sipping bitterness, pulling way, away and also a piano, why not, earlier a drum set that hovers between desire and reality and here also the tenuous balance of this silence- the measurements analyzed in silence, in silence and appearing a piano- now, mr Satie- the silence perhaps which I should announce, between these soft movement of spiderlike agility, this scratching into a plane of distances, of accuracy, and each target becomes purpose.
What raggin’ tangly temptation, what if a voice is greater than itself? And the balance to this attentive texture would Shepard, the great harvester of animals, by the cooperation, of multiple movements operated in syncopated opposition, were this elegance advocated unto each operative of the physical plane, what fantasy which provides itself selection, what rhythm now the footsteps would affirm, in the great volumes of breaths, how thoughts through this balance may equip, to which every story is always and already within itself- now could one accept such mystification? what, tell me, escapes such triviality? and you may ask whether one must not respond to the control, would any other image not also presuppose reflection of distance insufficient, scale and my love of great scale- before where fish in medium, in uniform space, in not this space which my honesty provides the tissue structure liquefies my mind too much- just these wearied notes, this movement of intensified nonmovement in the quiet of a vibration, if those can offer an oppositional inevitability- to live once beyond the external, yes, - in what dangerous acts shall I scandalize my sister, where such inevitabilities must exist,

How much can I hold onto the past, is what I’m asking, where the distribution of yourself must indicate value, if not among the exchange of consciousnesses, than within the great untouchability in the voided dimension in physical deconstruction, to this that which exist without oneself, the great intricacy affirming all intentionality, skating between heartbeats in abundance, blue eyed just as wordless as anything- like a silent cry in the cheerful familiarity of TARGET, the banner above which recognizes itself in your own, to return again to the waters of mystification, but only at the onset
Or in the moment of your copelessness, the movement in my mind more and more just also meditated into that which cannot, where also must I disenchant myself in that absence in adjacent realities.

Mankind, I must intervene in this way,

into the excited scientist

the novel never reads itself.

notes on soap-tops will formalize the reflections which are inside and only without death. And they come in comfortable quads (quad beats tri) to attain the sanctity only available at thirteen dollars a pop and with proper introduction and cohesion along the strict parallelism with within which the moral weight flutters: in the stretch-ing ocsilla-tion engineer-ing away from the blunt smokelessness of mis-exist-tential utilitiz-ing. They're only wings, they're only feathers, they're only fibers because the buffered compression of era permits and elicits flight, species, ecology zippered within organismization in conjunction and stepping determinated pace.

Meanwhile the daily struggle of the American people, absorbing the resultsof the power abuses by the rich, powerful and corporate, continues outsidethis inbred force field of insipid coverage and commentary.

human beings are human beings being human beings being, interested continuous be, a be that does continuously, earning itself the suffix. the human stays strong before the being, the human doesn't need nuthin to prove to nobody this side of needing to be, nosireee. human cuts down the ground with the guitar gut shot and tough guys the heeman concussion. humans doesn't isn't wasn't couldn't hasn't ya got it and leave it be not being at all alone. not interested! IN BEING!!!!! Not interested human! Human not interested, human leave me alone, human stop typing human what do you think you do human? YOU:RE DOING HUMAN WHAT? HUMAN WHY?? WHY?

a salty slap to the nuts ( or eluding consistency)

so I got my friend's car towed this morning, the result of the Stevens Neighborhood's fluctuating parking schedule and my absentmindedness- or, as was just articulated by the owner of the car: the "pile of irresponsibility" that I and others recognize as Ryan.

I don't disagree with this characterization, as I've often discribed my life as: Piles on top of other piles- intermingling collections of unorganization on a dusty floor reflecting the mis-interest of the things that come to me in the mail, that I reach out for at the library, the remnants of the pseudo-endevors of my education lingering within reach and out of sight (thank god), or the various periodical publications that I don't ever really want to take the time to sift through.

And this anxiety I have for periodicals, for any type of text that is produced at some sort of consistent, typically daily rate- now this is a hard nut to crack. It's connected to how people watch baseball, I've now learned, this comfort of consistency that eludes me, or that I am eluding, yes that's it. The anxiety is of being talked over- DO OVER! of people talking over themselves, before they finish what they were initially trying to say- which is how I exist anyway, especially when I'm writing while stoned, where flashes of flavor connect allong themselves, alright, amidst the effort of disavowing, of abandoning these thoughts even as they meet permanence- your sentences can really take some hard turns but that's what I like anyway, in literature, characters who make swift, momentous stabs at their own definition and deconstruction. They expand across the pages in my mind, instead of being absorbed more and more into the titles and headlines, leaving less to be uncovered, leaving less- just breaths before the next concussion of darker, grosser letters.

I just don't know what to read.

Oh, don't get me started on the word "just," pitting the entirity of existense against a single contingency, an inescapably convenient condition of need. Face the dictionary like a goodboy:
Main Entry:
1just
Pronunciation:
\ˈjəst, ˈjüst\archaic variant of joust

eh?

Function:
adjective
Etymology:
Middle English, from Anglo-French & Latin; Anglo-French juste, from Latin justus, from jus right, law; akin to Sanskrit yos welfare
Date:
14th century

a little better... but it's the adverb I'm after:

1 a: exactly, precisely b: very recently 2 a: by a very small margin : barely b: immediately, directly 3 a: only, simply b: quite, very

Nothing to back it up with... oh I have to work now, but before I also wrote this, which no longer belongs, the blog is lying!

This sort of connected to the idea of the car getting towed in this idea that people are responsible for the things that belong to them, to the extent that the threat of consequence shadows over the value of the things themselves- in where they are kept, in the condition that they are left in, in the ease of their re-emergence from a catalog. Bills and Paystubs are objects of some of my worst neglect, right after the various hakneyed efforts to either continue my education, figure out how to move to Germany, or even just secure some sort of rewarding/longstanding/tolerably lucrative employment.

write

Dan:

These words are for you, they contain the significance of our mutual desires....beeevvvaaarrrre!

you "should" have written 10 pages or more, you were distracted by tasks preventing your in-habitation of "the zone."
I responded: "Just do it, man."
you responded "that's not an answer, Ryan" - a paternal gesture, authorizing your reprimanding my response.

Now, as I was leaving, I began (to write this):

I do not mean to give you an answer, but only a command- that you expect an answer to emerge, that you worship (returning over and over again to) a perpetually hypothetical existence of yourself - this is an insult to the agency of your consciousness and your force as a thinker, reader, and most importantly your capabilities as a writer (which is one-who-WRITES, not one-who-has-written). The perpetuation of the intangibility of your existence is the silence, the non-thing, which demands from you a ceaseless and unrestrained attack. This is, for instance, why I suggested that you run. The process of running is perhaps the most immediate and tangible way to devastate one's physical homeostasis in the sense that when you run, you approach directly the limitations of your body- you need air, rest, reprieve, to relent against yourself- but it is also of course similarly effective and direct in destroying intangibility and the confusing distances of one's imagination- being lost within the mundane endlessness of oneself. I compare it to the sensation I used to achieve when vacuuming the dinning area of coffman memorial union. The cacophonous whining buzz of inextricable, unisolatable frequencies, overdrive without melody, encouraged meditation and focus through the elimination of the distances of one's imagination and silence- it destroyed the distance of the aural atmosphere.

That which offers resistance to articulation is necessarily (always and already) endowed with an element of mysticism, in that it eludes the materiality of language/signification by hearkening back to metaphysical concepts of permanence, time, and ceaseless meaning-
of that-which-remains-yet-to-be-seen
of divine tautology
of a future
of not.yet.
of beyond
of UseLessNess.

sometimes people sometimes i will hear; i will experience a guitar workout so utterly rapturous that rather than performing anything resembling serviceable air-guitar playing, i in cabal with my bodily parts, brainwaves, nerves, and emotions render something generously called "convulsing." No i don't nor can't just pantomime a simple repeated downstroke and attendant head-banging: instead, an imagined audience gets extremely convincing epilepsy. Also

Have you ever achieved this feat or rockn'roll-athletic fusion: While engaged in previously detailed guitar antics, other body parts of mine were doing this strangely possible thing--my feet, that is, were launching me into the air while, while, simultaneously now, pushing back against the ground, stompin' on it, as it were? Wow!

[good song to achieve said experience to: Menomena's "Trigga Hiccups"]

I cannot, for the life and death of a clown, think of a better way to insinuate myself into a new day than by listening to the Kinks' Arthur Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire. But "listening" is an incredibly understated way of describing and encoding the action--dare I might say, without effective brevity: feeling it, letting it inform every mechanical and biological function possibly contained within my body. As many amongst us have figured out over the years, music has an uncanny ability to sublimate, morph, and generally add a sense of pleasure to banal, quotidian, and commonplace activities, such as cleaning the kitchen. For me, Arthur accomplishes a feat even greater than the simple addition of pleasurable background noise.

As I cross the threshold separating my room from the kitchen, the warm, euphoric chords of "Victoria" promise a better-than-banal dishwashing experience. Not a minute in to the track, the simple chorus--repetition of the cry "Vic-tor-ia!"--convinces my vocal chords to collaborate with mouth and tongue and teeth, eventually causing, after a few scratchy false starts, my voice to careen along with Ray Davies with a cowboy's abandon. If I am not bounding across the kitchen floor, inaccurately picking out the guitar part during the song's half-breakdown around the 2:40 mark, punctuating those lines with my best attempts to replicate the guitar-incision-as-period as well, then I might be in the market for coffee's services.

The next three tracks on the album, while fantastic, imbue less wild energy than faithful crooning along to Ray Davies' inciscively witty analyses of bourgeois British society, war-mongering and empire-building. This is when the bulk of my kitchen work, ostensibly my primary goal, is actually completed. Then...

What's this?! As soon as the drums roll in on "Brainwashed," suds are flying. I'M FLYING. I'm bouncing! The understated guitar work is excellent, but it is only to provide groveling service to the towering, strutting, king-like horns. By this time, I've startled the dog and have to be careful that my less-than-well-orchestrated air guitar windmills and scissor-kicks have not decapitated or irrevocably dismembered poor Eliot. Shoo!

For no other reason than creative laziness, I'll basically elide over the rest of Arthur's tracklist-proper; Expect to mention (parenthetically, of course, that "Shangri-La" is one of the greatest songs ever, as is the subsequent "Mr. Churchill Says": Mid-song "the-town-is-being-bombed-holy-shit-shit-fuck!" sirens, anyone?)

By the time bonus track "This Man He Weeps Tonight" hits its stride, I am wailing along with Dave Davies' searching, impassioned chorus ("But this man he weeps tonight/And his head is bow with sorrow/But what can you do sitting there?!/When you'll let him cry tomorrow/Yes you'll let him cry tomorrow"), as the tambourine prods insistently and I clutch a dampened dish towel, my ever-pruning hands cycling through various textures and being dried-out unlike the Man's tears.

revisiting and revisiting the work-training, and then exiting

i know what it is- it's all summed up in this movie entitled "Leben BRD" or "Living in the Bundesrepublic of Deutschland". So this film is a documentary about the banal torture of instruction, and it goes from classes that pregnant couples attend to learn about the birthing process, to this amazing scene where this guy is describing the correct way to escape a vehicle which has turned on its side, to a man teaching a woman how to strip the correct way, interspersed with shots of various commodities being tested by pneumatic machines that drop weights onto chairs or apply forces over and over again. I guess that's a good way to describe this situation of cultural training- that it is a thing that one must train oneself for, and that it can be repeated, and that there is a right way to understand this here culture. We nestle in a sort of distance of consciousness that is nurtured by this type of training- the notion that there's a way to learn about everything, that there's a teacher that can be found, that nobody will be expected to spearhead their own experiences and derive their own fascination (because it could be wrong!). Without an authority, there can be no training, the distribution of knowledge cannot saturate and hypnotize an audience- there's always the (terrifying) possibility that the book you're reading has old dates- you know, all these books these days with all their knowledge that you just don't give a fuck about- come on books, knock it off!

letter to the editor of the star tribune

This letter is written from an email from move on dot org, encouraging and then basically setting me down in front of this interface, from where I can choose which paper to contact and then enter text. The subject is the Iraq war and the trend of exponential military spending, which of course I do feel is completely out of control, believing that all violence is hegemonic and, since it seems that money is all that anybody really wants to worry about, simply wasteful. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe the sun will only come up tomorrow if the great fortress of our government continues to build bombs, so we can be fierce, and so everybody outside our borders, everybody in our crosshairs trembles and cries out and says "yes, yes, please allow me to be free, please give me my 12 hours and my shitty schools, please give me everything I'm supposed to want and a new reason everyday to hate a distant, lurking evil." This Internet interface even gives me talking points, which include the accumulation of the national debt, as well as the squeezing of domestic programs like education, affordable housing, health care programs, ECT. This money is lost in as much as it does not increase our safety through the accumulation of things set aside, devoted to kill the poor. My question is: why are the poor people of foreign countries like Iraq getting all this murderous attention? It's not like the American poor aren't making a huge racket of their own about poverty. It's time our military brought their lessons of brutal justice home- if we're spending all of these funds on violent might and magnificence (because clearly there will always be an even more convenient way to murder the defenseless)- then let's use it where it counts, right here at home. If we're going to spend more money on bombs than we have since ol' dubya dubya two, then I want one on every street corner and in every establishment- if everyone just put down their worries and started REALLY putting their backs into it, we could have every half block of this city wired to detonate at the push of five or six buttons. I think I speak for America when I say I want tangible results, and if the only thing that can be accomplished is bloodshed then let's not be so discriminatory, let's share this wealth of death with our neighbors.

Glocks: 1, Samurai Swords: 0

I have a suspicion that conceal-and-carry provocateurs are beaming messages into my brain whilst sleeping. To wit, my vaguely-remembered dream from two nights prior:
The setting: college campus; from what I can recall, not the U of M in particular
The (severely limited) action:
I am in a building, near the largest "mall-like" area of Dream U, conversing with an unidentifiable "friend." The friend and I proceed to engage a stranger in some sort of debate or argument about something. My friend and I, our shared argumentative position, angers said stranger. Greatly angers him. Apparently our disparate point-of-view necessitated a strong reaction. One that went beyond angry, shouted reproaches or even fisticuffs and nestled right up against "attack with samurai sword." And attack with samurai sword the man did. Luckily for me, he went after my comrade and severed his limbs from his body first, allowing me to gain a better advantage that was allowed to my friend: running. And so I ran with an unusually heightened sense of purpose--with a seriousness that evokes comparison only to near-daily races against my brother down the gravel road from our neighbors house in Sturgis, South Dakota. Thankfully, the integrity of the running surface contained in my dream was a great improvement over the winding, downhill, gravel-composed road of my youth--and with the aid of surer, stabler footing, I was able to elude the sword-swinging psychotic long enough to incur only a few minor flesh wounds before my savior descended. More accurately, said savior happened to be milling about the mall--and packing heat. A situation which otherwise would have ceased with my bloodied and very disembodied corpse, instead concluded with a gun-toting fellow undergrad's heroic intercession.

some thoughts on cultural trainings

Q:did you like the presentation on Somali culture

A: I still don't really understand Somali history at all, but I think there's still a lot to learn about as far as what it means to have muslim culture within secular capitalism- I think there's sort of a condescending undertone when analyzing Islam- like it's some kind of game that people play that must be humored- there's this idea that overtly phallogocentric societies are backwards and inferior, while whomever makes the analysis is somehow free from any "incorrect" propogation of their own culture

what is left unsaid is exactly the same sort of assumed inevitability that allows such conflicts as ethnic war and indifference toward the waging of nationalistic struggle from within the context of enormous consequences after colonial violence.

Q: Do you like cultural trainings

A: yes, although frustrating as well, due to these perceptions that are difficult to deconstruct. I think these exercises are extremely important but volatile because they can have the effect of informing and consequentially engaging people in the struggle of cultural pluralism- which can be an agent of great influence as a tool of analysis against the inevitability of capitalism, but they can also have the effect of alienating the audience from these "other people" by allowing the exploration of "their" history to remain vague and impossible to understand- such as the history of Somalia. What this does is perpetuates a "distance" that can't be reduced.

In the words of Richard Leppert, Paraphrasing theodor Adorno: "Shit is caused" (as opposed to "shit happens")

ciao.

Animals: Fun to Pet; Better to Chew

Inquisition: Can we, all of us humans, simply just fucking agree already that major changes need to be made: to the base, the absolute bedrock of culture--to our general philosophy of thought and intellectual inquiry/debate? I am not talking, here, concerning the virtually meaningless political rhetoric of "CHANGE" that has been espoused ad nauseum by the Democrat-o-bots (the Democratobots!, the new reality show starring Obamobot and Clintobot (thanks to Edwardobot for participating!)); no, rather, I am deeply interested in a shift away from politically-minded thinking, a re-evaluation of spiritual (in the vaguest, non-religious sense) and philosophical concerns.

Over the past couple of years, my political involvement has failed to reach even the laziest level: simply voting in state or federal elections. And I am not the type of person to merely tout my "apathy," and respond to any challenge with the oft-used "my vote doesn't matter anyway." But it has become increasingly apparent that such a response would place a person just below a majority of those who are "politically active," i.e. people that just vote, based on, of course, slogans and symbols; and not on conscientious research and subsequent debate.

This whole entry has been and is going to continue to be: utterly scattershot. And I apologize for that; but these things, these towering IDEAS are hard to wrangle and tame. We are subject, in our current mass-media culture, to dizzying levels of stimuli: images, sounds--the whir of implacable technology. At times I am completely unaware and unsure of where my head is: on my shoulders? Hardly. But I must blow an intellectual load, prematurely yes, but with more discourse comes greater focus and stamina: then, an ability to parse these gigantic ideas and come up with some specifics.

I may be able to outline my general concern now. Yes: our institutions are broken. The SYSTEM and all its constituent mini-systems are irrevocably faulty as they are currently constituted.

The funny thing is, the claim that our votes are immaterial, is pretty close to true. It is my opinion that (and of course there are exceptions) citizens who are involved in the voting processes fall into roughly two categories: one type of voter is doggedly intent on supporting the party/candidate which is most likely to keep him comfortable, to keep him in his position of relative power with regard to social, economic, and various other concerns; the other voter, meanwhile, focuses on a candidate/party that promises the afforementioned CHANGE. The first voter is a short-sighted, selfish prick, while the second voter is naive at best. And I sure do love being able to draw these lines, create these groups opposite or adjoining one another. It has been made possible by mankind's capitulation to polar thinking (bad/good, good/evil, and on and on).

Sadly, I do not think that one can effectively vote EVEN IF his concerns are so narrowly defined and ill-considered. It seems obvious--due to the prevalence of distracting, ever-progressing technological advances along with our continued insistence, as a nation of good capitalists, that we must work at least one third of our waking hours--that simply we just do not have the time to reasonably acclimate ourselves to political issues. The problem is our reaction to this dilemna does not involve philosophical reconsideration. No, no, no. The media responds by covering less and less actual news in a less and less objective manner: more graphic explosions! Panels of "experts" talking over each other, espousing their unimaginative, self-serving policy stances. But with so little time to cover actual news that affects people, how do our networks find the time for this (as one example--this is just a paraphrase of the segment)?:

"Fish funerals" have become a YouTube sensation. People have been placing their dead fish in the toilet, along with tokens or garlands to mark the occasion, and flushing them in a filmed ceremony (that was the general narration to go along with video evidence of the funerals, and probably some wicked-sweet graphics too).

The Fox News anchor providing this story, after describing more-or-less what I just described, asked indignantly: "Don't these people have anything better to do?!" If I have to explain the sad, sad irony of that quote, then I am afraid our blogger/reader relationship must end.

There is much more to talk about, hopefully with lots more focus and clarity, but I have got to quit for the time being. My mind already caved-in four times in the midst of the preceding rant; this is all just too, too much. This is surely to be continued with more suspense, and maybe a love-triangle. And graphics! Mind-warping graphics. Til' next screed...

Time Measured With Sound!

Excuses! Bah! Who wants to read anything, ever? Why not remain in a huddling clairvoyance?

What speed do you dare to read at? Slow that down buster. Get off that bus, put down that cigarette, turn off that music and sit up straight at your desk. You can't even have any tea.

The best place to read corrosive fiction is on the merry go round. That way each word makes you angrier and angrier. Or turn up the radio, have some licorice and a pepsi, munch on a bagel with cream cheese, and then scribble into your dream journal. Who do you think you are? When you read your book, do you think the world goes away? Whatcha gonna get with all that book lernin' eh? A loaded noggin, too much of nuthin. That's my name, see. Chillax.

I just witnessed some intellectual grappling, some eevaysive manoovahs. A lil of this here is what a book should goddamn be, wahpow. But this movies purty cool, it's called once, and it's a cutsy luveedove, maybe it's just the accents and those sonic acrobatics- shees cute cause she dragged the vacuum cleaner around like a lil puppy, I like her, she's cuhlahd, I like er'- I Lyyyyke thisss Cuhlerd Grrrl... iiiiiii Lyyyyyyke thisss Colored grrl- I LIKE ER!
Woh, now there's all this sweet feelings happening on the moovee screeen. I LUV it when they're talking but you can't hear it, I hate to fucking hear them talkeee walk, I just want the guitars to come outa their mouths and the sky, dive-bombing my heart like the chimes of freedom did to the Vietcong.
(GOOD JOKE!)
oh, it's over. A nice lil movie, huh? That ONCe movie was pretty good you know, like, it's real, really really real hard, hard real, real like the credits and that title track.

how reading happens (or does not)

About seven or eight weeks ago, I checked out 'Death on the Installment Plan' by Louis-Ferdinand Celine from the public library. I had been intending to read this book for some time, as I had read another Celine novel a few years past and had claimed it as one of my favorites--before I even had finished the first five pages, I believe.



Except I did not voraciously devour Celine: his words, his style, his embleakened blackness (full disclosure: "embleakened" is made up)--not at all as I anticipated I would. There were reasons, I am sure. Reasons: I had also checked out another book on the same day (Kundera!) and had taken yet one more on loan from a friend. I began to read the Celine almost immediately, but I had not progressed very far when I began to eschew Celine for the others. By the time I completed 'Slowness' by Kundera, I had purchased another book: 'Difficult Loves' by Italo Calvino--a collection of wonderfully-detailed and lovingly written short stories by the Cuban-born Italian master. This tome summoned my fancy, and before I could even explain a word to Celine--an apology... a yell of "i'll be back! i promise!" as I was being swept away on the train to Rome...anything at all--I was happier with Calvino. Life was several shades brighter.

Initially, when I hesitated about going on with the Celine, I was not making a value judgment per se, rather I was concerned mostly for my mood. While Celine is incredibly funny, he is more consistently, simply--dark. Charred. Blackened. Left in the oven for four days at four hundred and forty degrees. Then zapped in the microwave. You know, for good measure. I was concerned for my mood, I say. So concerned that I actually had a brief affair with a collection of love sonnets by Pablo Neruda, and I am certainly not a "poetry person" mind you, my fair reader. I gather that I was really tightening up at Celine's endless declarations that every human being (especially he himself) is a dirty scoundrel, a blackguard. I needed to breathe, and my air had been too thickened by venomous, sickly declarations on the avariciousness of humanity.

I was not enjoying Celine. How could this be?! A Supreme talent! Let us zoom out, hold on a longer shot for a bit: some more context: Around roughly the same time I acquired Celine, I had started to work four nights a week doing overnight shifts at an opulent condominium building in downtown Minnepolis. Most of my "work" consisted of watching "Seinfeld" and "Law & Order: Criminal Intent" reruns, reading, writing, or raiding the building's custodial supplies for my personal, at-home use. In any case, I noticed that I was entirely, utterly devoid of any interest in reading the Celine while I was sitting at work. Yet, I would bring out the Celine while zooming to and fro work on the train (or even ambling along on the 22-bus). Wait: it would be incorrect to say that I noticed this phenomenon at the time. This idea, this connection I want to reveal came about just tonight as I hunkered down in my bedroom in an attempt to slosh through the muddy rue de Celine. Turns out, I could not get myself to concentrate. And I know that I have been enjoying the Celine more recently, as I am finally just over one hundred pages shy of conclusion. But I finally put my fingers on the pulse of the problem: motion (or lackthereof). That is to say, I have found the book much more agreeable while being whisked about by one form of conveyance or another.

To elucidate: one key aspect of Celine's writing concerns his sense of style. He made no mistake of convincing any one he ever spoke to about his writing, that he was wholly committed to inventing and incubating a distinct style--and thereby invigorating what he viewed as a stagnant medium--writing. To give an idea of what a typical paragraph looks like in a Celine novel, here is an excerpt from 'Death':

At the venereal clinic we used to mark vertical bars on a big sheet of paper as we went along . . . That was all there was too it. A red stroke: Salvarsan. Green: mercury. And so on. The rest was routine . . . All we had to do was pump the juice into their buttocks or the bend of their arms . . . It was like larding a roast. Green! . . . Arm! Yellow . . . get those pants down! . . . Red! . . . Both buttocks . . . Another on in the ass! . . . Ditto! Bismuth! Blue! Dripping vein! Swine! Get those pants one! . . . Swab that arm! . . . The rhythm was merciless. Batches and batches of them . . . Endless lines . . . Limp cocks . . . pricks . . . dripping peckers . . . oozing. Festering . . . Starched sheets, as stiff as cardboard! Clap! . . . Queen of the world! The ass is its throne! Heated summer and winter! . . .

Celine used ellipses heavily. Even many paragraphs are not really paragraphs based on conventional definitions. They just trail off with ellipses. Sentences do not end. There are no sentences. Well, few, anyway. The connection, to get back to my point, is the rhythm. Celine's writing has a stylistic rhythm, in 'Death' at least, all its own and a reader is properly suited to read it only while traveling. Celine's exclamations bounce off the page in proper sync with the gentle, and sometimes jarring bumps created by the bus and the boulevard.

Sadly, Celine has been with me too long and through too many renewals, more than the library can handle. So I must return it tomorrow; and I am sure that I will crack it open once the bus driver's foot hits the gas.

I am curious, to anyone that might be reading: Have there been any books in your life that required a particular setting for you to effectively read them? Any comments about an author's use of style or syntax, in which any attempt at reading said author required a seventy-four degree, partly cloudy June day with a dewpoint of sixty-five degrees?

you to me

what I like best is the seam

which runs around quietly

excusing itself and ignored

by all the professions

that your body can be.

It soaks you all up

and your displaced smile

and your anxious purpous

they find their way into my delirious

inner negotiations:



a boy made out of bits and pieces, an engine, a turkey



and glasses to steal from the cupboards



as you approach me, walking through grass and crustaceans



why you found me at this center, you probably planned it, job training



you acknowledge me before I wake, this is the only place that I can access your needs, and you bring them to me.

you can bet it is a bitch, kid.

the reason it has taken so long to follow my initial post and too much's subsequent post: the sheerly ridiculous verbosity displayed by mr. too much. and to think that his shit is actually quite fucking coherent. mind-bending, it is.
and i don't even have anything that i really want say right now. really. nothing. i got nothin' my eyes are foggy and heavy and i have to pee. so i'm leaving now. but in the future, shit's gonna get real analytical concerning these and maybe other topics: No Country for Old Men, Yo La Tengo, politics (ugh), anal fisting (probably not though), jens lekman, girls, women, robbing old people (they're feeble and their faculties are fading fast!), and love (that's right jerks. i have feely-thingies), unmitigated hostility toward unknown internet users and possible blog-readers, and space heaters (too lazy to heat the entirety of a building, are ya?!?).

the urine is now dribbling down my thigh...gotta ru

I can't be more retarded

I've got the same christmas card from one of my wisconsin aunts, entirely blank but for the front cover, which has four tiny pictures in the rudimentary shape of a stupid face. a gold ornament for the right eye, a red wrapped gift for the left, a green christmas tree for a nose, and a candy cane for the asymmetrical mouth. all boxed in a faintly outlined green and red rectangle. I hated it so much as soon as I saw it, and now it will never leave me, I'm just going to keep hiding it where it will occur and occur again- the moment you see it, it disappears because there is nothing to see anymore. at some point, some magical day, i won't see a face at all, the coersive spacing will cease deciphering itself despite my laziness.

(its existence has already neutralized all my brain power)

inhabitatione le consciousness

"ooh OOH ooh, woh-oh-oh, oooh OOOH ooh, a higher power"

I am writing about a song by a Swedish poppist, the Lekman; the story of a love discovered as divine through blasphemous acts of irrational ecstasy.

"In church on Sunday making out in front of the preacher/You had a black shirt on with a big picture of Nietzsche/When we had done our thing for a full christian hour/ I had made up my mind that there must be a higher power"

I'm on a god kick: yesterday I woke up and watched Bergman's Winter Light, a film that worships god in the only way I regard meaningful, ridiculing every solidified notion determined by the christian institution: trust in a creator that has created so much sorrow, participation in the holy communion between characters without any hope of communicating their hopelessness, and punctuating the revelation of godlessness with the suicide of Max von Sydow, Bergman's devout knight of ceaseless hope and terrible vengeance.

I also enjoyed "The Virgin Spring", which is back, as far as I understand it, in medieval Sweden. Two images from that film are still with me weeks later. After the revelation of his daughter's rape and murder, Max von Sydow leaves his family and wordlessly approaches a lone ash tree; the ambivalence of his place and intention, his purpose for the tree, one might fathom, in each of their solitudes, his and the tree's, may be a sort of pained repentance, a focus on young beauty, the tree is only a few years old... growing as true and healthy as his his untainted daughter before her murder.

But, as we see, the violence must be consecrated through the sapling's brutal destruction- not with the elegance of a blade, the tree is ripped down by Von Sydow's broken heart and merciless hands. The struggle endures a poignant lapse of terrible bending, powerless, but ceaseless exertion, in one direction, but back the other, back and forth the tree is categorically doomed, weakening and weakening in the knight's hands until its foundation is irreparably compromised, and the young plant rests on the ground, to whither on its lonely bluff. I find this scene infinitely more poignant as a representation of violence than almost any human to human representation; it even might trump cruelty to animals, which always inspires faces pinched with disgust, gut-reactions of coercive vengeful energy, loud cries of incoherent anger, etc. To compare these representations, one has to contextualize the inspirations for violence. In the gut-reaction to defend the life of a weaker "loved-thing," the polarity of good and evil is definite and simple: kill the cruel fucker. The energy crescendos and climaxes like an orgasm of hatred, which it is.

When Von Sydow approaches the tree, his hatred is either concealed or neutralized. His energy is not chaotic, but persistent, and in the context of the film, resigned and fateful. It occurs within a context of immense, inexpressible sorrow- in that the evil is internalized, the color of the pain is understood as unfathomable, in how Von Sydow's act occurs in silence: the destruction is not accomplished with a naive intuition that all will be set right again, but with a determination reflecting the irrevocable weight of all that has occurred in this life that up until then was governed by a just and loving god: this violence against nature consummates the fear that god has retreated and left humans to fend for themselves. call it existential violence, sublimated vengeance.

The other, literally magical scene is the final miracle at the site of the virgin's death, and I'm going to pretend to work now so let's look at that later.