Loooong analytics piece about story rating/voting trends on an erotic fiction website: one, and two.

I'm fascinated.

Someone left this in our mailbox:



Also, a dilemma:

I feel a strong urge to stop speaking to people who list Murakami or Palahniuk as their favorite authors.

The problem:

If I actually stopped speaking to those people, I would have to defriend* like half the people on my various social networks.


* why isn't this a legitimate verb yet?!?

Atlanta Eco fans: Umberto Eco's giving a free lecture at Emory University this Sunday.  I think it starts at 4, but I could be wrong.  Check Emory's site for more details.

Ghost Riding the Cracker Circuit - Cultural studies/journalist guy goes wandering around small town festivals talking to people. Namedrops so far include: Marx, Fredrick Jameson, allusions to a few semioticians (I don't know if that's the right word), lots of ancient Greek philosophers, and a few populist (as in the American political movement) thinkers/politicians. Almost done, and I'm enjoying it, even if the theory discussion is fairly shallow.

The Castle - By my man Kafka. I've never gotten more than 30 pages or so into any of Kafka's work. He freaks me the fuck out. Especially the bug one. I'm trying with this, but I'm still only ten pages in.

The Origins of Postmodernity - speaking of Jameson... this is a topic I'm pretty into, as I still get confused when people say postmodern. In the first chapter, I've learned that the origin of the word was as the description of a South American literary movement which Borges was (sort of) connected to. Go figure.

Some Psychedelic Book - a collection of stories and anecdotes written by counterculture icons about psychedelics, divided between mushrooms, acid, DMT, PCP, Ayahuasca, ecstasy, poppy, and a lot of weirder stuff I've never heard of. I actually just finished this - a few of the stories are great, many of them are hilarious, but about half are stupid "this was funny because we were high" type stories. Still, a fun read.

So, yeah - have you read any of these?  what are you reading?  what should I read next?

3am.  You will see that smile in your nightmares.

Also, The Count of Monte Cristo isn't so great.  I'm 79 pages in, and Mr. Cristo still hasn't stabbed anyone.

Are Dumas' others any better?

I applied for an internship at Paste Magazine about a month ago, and still haven't gotten a reply back.  I guess that's a good thing, because last time I applied and was rejected within 1.5 weeks.  Still, I'm used to insto-internet-age-communication.

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Can't sleep.  Just got back from a quick trip around the city's usual biker hangouts, but couldn't find anyone to go riding with.  The total trip worked out to be 10.9 miles (a bit less, because I took a shortcut through the park), which google says should take 36 minutes by car.  I finished it in almost exactly that time.  Average MPH = about 18.

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Here's some of Tao Lin's Eeeee Eee Eeee:

He drops Steve off.  On the way home Arby's, Taco Bell, McDonald's, Walgreen's, Kmart, Starbucks, in a row.  Andrew stares at that.  He wants to subvert them somehow.  He is against capitalism for some reason; something about how it directs human perception away from sentient beings and toward abstractions; he is also against being against things, because the binary nature of the universe is against being agaisnt things.  Still, he wants to cause destruction to McDonald's.  It would be good to subvert all those places.  Sara would agree.  They'd go in Starbucks, wreak complex and profound havoc.  People would scream and make faces of agony and intrigue.  At home people would sit with Kleenex and contemplate what had happened, then quietly weep.  He and Sara would run to his gigantic house, laughing complexly.  The house is enormous.  A mansion.  No it isn't.  Just a large house.  A mansion is a large house.  Andrew's parents live in a tower in Berlin.  Andrew saw photos: eight towers, in a row.  In one hundred years the Earth will resemble a metal ball with spikes.  It will move shinily through the univers - confused, deadly.  Grade-schooler, Why does the Earth look like a midieval weapon?

These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read.

( Sleep sleep sleep. )

From a 1 star Amazon review of Alice In Wonderland:

"I think the book Alice in Wonderland is a very good book. While it can be confusing at times, it makes you wonder. For example, when they were talking to the turtle, it didn't make very much sense. Also, the trial over the pastries, it was very idiotic, and if that trial happened today it would get thrown out. Lastly, at the hare and mad hatter's on going tea party, it was very senseless. The author's use of language was very unlike our language today. For example, when she said so many times the words, "shot up", it sounds English or something. The book has this tone a lot throughout it. Maybe the author has English back round. But it was in very easy to understand language, accept for the times people were talking non-sense. The main character is Alice. At sometimes she can seem clueless, and go on rambling like while talking with the turtle. She even pointed it out her-self. A lot of her decisions during the book make no sense. Like to just walk off with that little pig at the Duchess' house. And why would she follow the rabbit to an unknown land to begin with. There was many times where she confused me sometimes. Like when she talked with the caterpillar and said she wasn't the person she started as at the beginning of the day. One thing of the book I did not understand was the theme. In fact I did not see a theme. The only thing close to a theme was a girl trapped in an unusual world, with no way out. One other thing I didn't see in the book was a plot. The entire book was was a girl going with the flow and seeing where the adventure took her. The cat that kept disappearing and appearing even asked her why did she need directions to somewhere, if she didn't know where she was going. In my opinion this book had no effectiveness. It also had no meaning. It had no moral, and nothing to learn from it. So I think the book was very pointless, and just something to read for fun.'"

A different reviewer, on Borges' Labyrinths: Selected Stories:

This book is filled with short stories of bad boring science fiction. References, complete with page numbers, to non existent books only add to the tedium

Nabokov's Ada:

This is a masturbatory fantasy. Nabokov has created his dream world: The United States and Russia are one country and everybody who's anybody speaks French, too; World War I never happened, let alone World War II; and Van Veen has a lifelong love affair with his cousin Ada (actually his sister), full of passion, yearning, intellectual stimulation, and the thrill of the forbidden, plus a soupcon of jealousy provided by Ada's full sister Lucette, who wants Van to love her, too, and finally kills herself for want of him, spicing Van's life with a touch of sweet remorse. Oh - I forgot to mention the voyeuristic lesbianism when Lucette describes her own affair with Ada, and their threesome.
If this isn't the stuff of your dreams, you may find Nabokov's mandarin literary style a little heavy for the subject matter, like a g-string made of real cloth of gold.

Lolita:

All this hoopla about Lolita made me curious enough to read it. Don't tell me this is about love. This pedophile clearly stalks young girls. Maybe his first true love could never blossom, but to carry that feeling throughout his life screams psychological problems, not love.

Crying of Lot 49:

Lot 49 was introduced to me by an English professor at the university I attend. I can tell anyone that it is the worst novel (fiction for that matter!) that I have ever read. I enjoy reading fiction and I cannot believe that this novel could ever be popular. P's sentences ramble on and on as if he was in a state of mass hysteria or a drug induced coma when he was writing. Not only does this novel not make sense, I have to agree with another reader that it is not in the least bit interesting. I WILL BE FORTUNATE IF I NEVER HAVE TO READ ANOTHER BOOK BY PYNCHON AGAIN IN MY LIFE!

This cover is fucking brilliant.  I imagine the conversation between cover artist and editor went something like:

Editor:  The book's about bombs and sex.
Artist: Gotcha.

This is Capt Crunk's remix of Black Lips' Veni Vidi Vici.  Also brilliant.

Expect a long picture post sometime in the evening.  Bring a rain jacket.

I spent the morning taking pictures of snow, reading Jack of Fables, and figuring out how to pay for my next semester of school.



Jack of Fables is pretty good.  Most of the best jokes require a good knowledge of folk tales, which I don't have.

Also, did you know that I have 315 shares in International Thoroughbred Incorporated?  I think we raise ponies!

Looking through one of my book piles, I found a passage I'd marked a few months ago:

Everything touched off my imagination in strange ways.  The school science library, thanks to an over-enlightened biology master, was a cornucopia of deviant possibilities.  In a dictionary of anthropology I discovered a curious but touching fertility rite, in which the aboriginal tribesmen dug a hole in the desert and took turns to copulate with the earth.  Powerfully moved by this image, I wandered around in a daze, and one midnight tried to have an orgasm with the school's most cherished cricket pitch.  In a glare of torchbeams I was found drunk on the violated turf, surrounded by beer bottles.  Strangely enough, the attempt seemed far less bizarre to me than it did to my appalled headmaster.

That's from J G Ballard's The Unlimited Dream Company, written in 1979.

School's over.  I got the internship.  Going down to Florida Saturday morning.  Back Thursday, then a wedding.  Then spend a week scrounging for money.  Then building stuff in New Orleans for a week.  And then school again.

I want to stripe my walls with neon bamboo.

I was rolling around my bed trying to get to sleep last night, and I realized that I really wanted to write. I was surprised. I've said that I want to be a writer a lot over the last two years, but I didn't realize how impatient I was about the whole thing until last night. I feel like school's getting in the way - I'm still learning, but most of my learning is based on close proximity to the school's library, rather than work assigned for class.

I'm excited about this internship, and I'm excited about trying to be a journalist, and I really think I could spend my whole life writing.

The phrase that came to mind last night was, "a dirty window between your eyes and the world".

It was late.

I've gotta go take an Allen wrench to my bike seat real quick, and then return half my bookshelf to Oglethorpe's library.

"He was an embittered atheist (the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him), and took a sort of pleasure in thinking that human affairs would never improve. Sometimes, he said, when sleeping on the Embankment, it had consoled him to look up at Mars or Jupiter and think that there were probably Embankment sleepers there. He had a curious theory about this. Life on earth, he said, is harsh because the planet is poor in the necessities of existence. Mars, with its cold climate and scanty water, must be far poorer, and life correspondingly harsher. Whereas on earth you are merely imprisoned for stealing sixpence, on Mars you are probably boiled alive. This thought cheered Bozo, I do not know why. He was a very exceptional man."

From George Orwell's Down and out in Paris and London. [full text]

I'll be canoing in the Everglades next weekend.  I can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to it.  My parents will be sharing one canoe, and I'll be piloting another by myself.  It's not very hard to canoe the Everglades - there's a very slight current always pushing you towards the Gulf, so you can take breaks from paddling without worrying about the wind blowing you all out of order.  I'm gonna bring this big stack of not-academic books, maybe even some science fiction.  If my arms can still move at night, I might even write something.

I think we'll be out for three nights.

When I woke up this morning, my cat (who I had let in last night) was biting my head.  I think it's her new way of asking for food.  Now she's sitting on the arm of the couch behind me.  When I lean my chair backwards, she mriaourwws and swats at my stray hairs. 

All my windows are open, and wood smoke smelling fall air blusters its way into my study.

I sometimes worry that I'm too happy now.  Maybe I'm using up a supply I'll need in the future?

 So, New College/Florida things still left to talk about:

People
Anarchism
Architecture

I've added architecture because I keep thinking of those funny box houses, and they get cooler the more I remember them.

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I'm still stuck on this Tender is the Night paper.  I'm trying to analyze three pieces of narration given by the protagonist's wife.  One is a series of letters, the next is stream of conciousness (though addressed to several different characters within the novel), and the third's the same sort of realist narration used by the novel's other two main characters.  As in Ulysses, the stream of conciousness style is "female", while the realist style is "male".  However, it is implied that Nicole (the wife) expresses herself through stream of conciousness because she is insane - as she becomes/acts more sane, her narration is stylistically closer to that used by the story's two male narrators.

Additionally, Fitzgerald implies that Nicole's insanity is based on societal pressure - she's forced to assume the female/insane form of narration by her position as the daughter of a wealthy American widower.

I don't know.  Maybe this'll give me another paragraph.

-

I'm going to get fitted for a suit tonight.  Chris's wedding is in two or three weeks.  I'm a best man.  Not really sure what that means.  I think I have to stand at the altar and avoid yawning while everyone else sits down to watch the ceremony.  Also, I may have to be his second if he's challenged to a duel.  I'm sure it's very complicated.

There was less screaming than I expected.



I keep having those strange dreams I mentioned earlier. The content of the dreams isn't strange; they're actually very mundane. So much so that I wake the next day and wonder which parts of my dreams happened in real life. I had a dream about walking with a friend, and we talked about normal things, but I think in the dream I mentioned something which was not necessarily a secret but I wouldn't have said it if I wasn't in a dream. So, I woke the next morning and wasn't sure if the dream was an exact replication of the previous day's walk, or an extrapolation from the walk it was modeled on. And calling a friend to ask whether or not you dreamed what you said to them is probably a bit déclassé.

(I keep forgetting to throw Borges at my so-called-friends.  I'm afraid that I'll go to pick up a copy of his Collected Fictions from the Oglethorpe Library, and then start reading it on the train, and then be lost forever.  The first time I started reading him, my brother was playing video games on the other side of the room, and I believe he asked, "are you fucking choking?"  But I was actually just laughing too hard to breath.)

After getting back from the protest, my ride dropped me off at the train station near her house.  I heard the train braking as I fished for my card, and I ended up squeezing between two closing doors just before the bastard started up.  That was pretty great.

Mainly armadillos and hedgehogs.

Currently Reading:

Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism
Continental Philosophy Since 1750
The Metamorphoses of Metaphor
A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory
On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism
The Portable Stephen Crane

This reader-response stuff is pretty fascinating. Though most of the criticism I'm reading addresses only writing, it's interesting to consider how a reader-response type approach is used in other media.

I still haven't decided what I think of Stephen Crane. He's a Naturalist, and I've never found that movement very interesting except in a historical sense. In certain ways (which I hope to expand on later) the movement is similar to the "lowbrow" art movement we've been miring through since the 80's [not sure if this date is correct]. Basic similarities: predominance of single philosophy throughout work, unquestioned nature of said philosophy, emphasis on visual "richness", art as representation/"voice" of previously unseen portion of the population.

Anyway, here's the opening to Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets [subtitled "A Story of New York"]-

  A very little boy stood upon a heap of gravel for the honor of Rum Alley. He was throwing stones at howling urchins from Devil's Row who were circling madly about the heap and pelting him.
  His infantile countenance was livid with fury. His small body was writhing in the delivery of great, crimson oaths.
  "Run, Jimmie, run! Dey'll get yehs," screamed a retreating Rum Alley child.
  Naw," responded Jimmie with a valiant roar, "dese micks can't make me run."


Isn't this shirt great?

"Kiss my ass Lone Ranger!"

I had that song on repeat while I showered this morning. The floor of my apartment is solid concrete (apart from carpeting and insulation and stuff). Any hint of bass is trebled by my shower pipes.

Other things: Derrida starts to make a lot more sense after you've been drinking heavily.

A sample passage, followed by relevant footnote:

Now it happens, I would say in effect, that this graphic difference (a instead of e), this marked difference between two apparently vocal notations, between two vowels, remains purely graphic: it is read, or it is written, but it cannot be heard. It cannot be apprehended in speech, and we will see why it also bypasses the order of apprehension in general. It is offered by a mute mark, by a tacit monument, I would even say by a pyramid, thinking not only of the form of the letter when it is printed as a capital, but also of the text in Hegel's Encyclopedia in which the body of the sign is compared to the Egyptian Pyramid. The a of differance, thus, is not heard; it remains silent, secret and discreet as a tomb: oikesis. And thereby let us anticipate the delineation of a site, the familial residence and tomb of the proper in which is produced, by differance, the economy of death. This stone - provided that one knows how to decipher its inscription - is not far from announcing the death of the tyrant.

The footnote:

The last three sentences refer elliptically and playfully to the following ideas. Derrida first plays on the "silence" of the a in differance as being like a silent tomb, like a pyramid, like the pyramid to which Hegel compares the body of the sign. "Tomb" in Greek is oikesis, which is akin to the Greek oikos - house - from which the word "economy" derives. Thus Derrida speaks of the "economy of death" as the "familial residence and tomb of the proper" . Further, and more elliptically still, Derrida speaks of the tomb, which always bears an inscription in stone, announcing the death of the tyrant. This seems to refer to Hegel's treatment of the Antigone story in the Phenomenoloy...

There's another page of similar dancing around the subject: basically, he's revisiting Saussure's approach to semiotics. Derrida starts by comparing English "difference" with French "differance". (at least, that's as far as I've read). I'm not sure why he needs to cover two pages with Greek, French, and Latin puns before actually approaching his topic.

Finish bike tomorrow, Walid Raad this Wednesday, Midterm Thursday morning, library power-hour(s) Thursday evening, and Florida (?!) over the weekend.

The connecty thing is still a problem, but I have shelved it, to be reexamined far in the future.

MY cat brought me a dead mouse AND a dead bird. The bird is hidden somewhere in my apartment. I only know it is there because of all the feathers on my kitchen floor. The mouse is right next to the trashcan.

Startbackpacking.com is gonna publish one of my old stories from Turkey. I'll let you know when it's up.

I might be one hour short of my graduation requirements next semester, but I am devising a plan.

I keep missing Dr Hyman's office hours; I want to tell her that the reason I've been skipping class is because each time I go I end up spending the next few hours feeling horrible about humanity. But I'm not sure of a good way to explain it. There's really no good way to say "it's not you, it's the students". I mean, because student stupidity is a partial reflection of a teacher's inability to teach them correctly, and I loved the last class she taught. Just not this one.

I think I'm reading at least seven books right now.

I haven't taken any adhd drugs for 2 and a half weeks. I can't tell if I'm working better because I have to push myself to compensate for lack of chemically induced concentration, or if I've just been drinking way too much caffeine (probably true), or if I'm actually functioning at 80% mental capacity and don't realize it because it's been so long since I was at 100%.

Please tell me what you think of this:

I've often heard that geographical space is constructed by the people who inhabit it, and vice versa.  We're vividly reminded of this maxim when we a read a "Southern novel", or view a gallery of "folk art":  winding red dirt roads, larger than life suns just barely above the horizon, and pervading decay, heralded by rust and kudzu throughout the typical Southern work.  Contemplating these images, I can't avoid thinking of MARTA, a political and economic machine which goes great lengths to distance itself from the decaying organic archetypes which haunt our conceptions of the "New South".  Being a somewhat twerpy young man, I decided to spend a week talking with MARTA employees and riders, building a new geography from our collective perceptions.

I've been reading some of Claude Levi-Strauss's lectures, and I'm afraid they're poisoning my carefully constructed anthropologies.

I've been having a great last few days. I don't know why, but it could be because I'm finally done with midterm exams and papers, or because I'm actually sort of writing again (even if half of what I write sounds like the Benji section from The Sound and the Fury), or maybe just because I've got a whole day free to sleep in the park on Sunday. Gonna bring bread for the ducks.

I had a hilarious video posted a few hours ago, but trying to put it behind an lj-cut trashed a few of my entries and did other horrible things. This is the video. It is of two people trying to eat oreos. I wish I could broadcast it on national television. Sort of an antidote for the blues.

Oh, and, integracer !  Please ignore any advice I may have given you at 2:30 ay em.  It was horrible advice.  Fidelity is completely awesome.  I give bad advice, I forgot to mention.  Please do the opposite of what I say.

PS:  Breakfast was my first entirely successful scrambled eggs (with locally grown mustard greens, dried sungold tomatoes, Vidalia onions, and mushrooms.  I think the cheese was from Vermont).  I also had toast and jam.

"The fate of an epoch that has eaten of the tree of knowledge is that it must... recognize that general views of life and the universe can never be the products of increasing empirical knowledge, and that the highest ideals, which move us most forcefully, are always formed only in the struggle with other ideals which are just as sacred to others as ours are to us."

- Max Weber, quoted in David Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity


"Perhaps part of the reason a more sophisticated sociological analysis [of PMS symptoms in the workplace] is not done is that those who comment on and minister to these women do not see that the women's mental and physical state gives them trouble only given a particular kind of industrialized society.  For these observers it is the women who malfunction and must have their hormonal imbalances fixed, not the organization of society and work that might be transformed so that it could demand less constant discipline and productivity."

- Emily Martin, Blood Magic:  The Anthropology of Menstruation


In addition to the frequent use of the Spanish term sol ("sun"), the most common name for the sun in Misminay is inti.  These two terms, sol and inti, are used in most day-to-day contexts.  However, I also heard the following names used on various occasions:  Nuestros Dios ("our Lord"), Otuno ("autumn"), Taytacha (Jesus Christ and "[male] saint"), and Huayna Capac (the eleventh Inca king"

- Gary Urton, At the Crossroads of the Earth and the Sky: An Andean Cosmology

-

That's what I'm reading tonight.  Urton's book is for a paper I'm writing, and I'm reading the other two because they're really awesome.

I'm not sure if that girl and I were dating, as we had carefully avoided discussion of our relationship until yesterday, but, whatever we were doing, we quit doing it this Wednesday at noon.  It turned out to be the best possible time and weather to end even a short relationship, and we lay around under a tree after our opening statements had been completed, leisurely negotiating for the rest of the afternoon.

(A note for those who aren't used to my speech patterns: when I use legal sounding words to describe interpersonal communication, I am joking.  Also, when I use more than two commas in a sentence, I'm making my thoughts more complex as a parody of late 19th/early 20th century writers.  And, if I write a paragraph with several long sentences followed by a short one, I am more concerned about the audio flow of the paragraph than its actual content.  I talk almost the exact same way that I write, though you usually won't get more than a sentence out of me at a time in real life.)