words written in the week of
April 28th to May 4th
in previous years.
This was 10 years, 25 days ago

I think the thing about J dying last summer was that it felt so sad, so especially sad because we were all out of this program, jettisoned out only just a little bit. and J was someone one could count on to be wild, to push a little bit, to be self-directed, focused. dreams of a cnc router in the garage, skating all over the city, painting murals on walls. looking back on this log it seems like I only mentioned it once, really, but it seems obvious to me that the afterimage of an event smeared itself across the next few weeks and months and left a distinct aftertaste; the promise of futures, some readjustment of the idea of fulfillment, a withdrawal from a public, some re-questioning of what I was doing what I was doing, and which path one chooses to take.

-

and now? I repeat this path again and hover/circulate/orbit around the main point. avoid statements.

This was 14 years, 24 days ago

maybe this image, maybe this image of a window up high oblong and someone working late into the night, hazy sky, some music in the background, things about to get ready to end, doors closing and shutting. maybe. that cliched cross-section of a city with windows lit, lit up with the color of incandescent-yellow, that's it.


what's the coincidence? nearly two years ago I wrote:

==

tonight is probably deep and lengthly and stretches far lengthwise depthwise, a giant sheet hanging in the air extending further. In any loft or one-bedroom apartment could be the makings of a novel.

43 years ago aram saroyan types a word, not even paratactic, just before leaving his hollow obelisk to slip through tunnels beneath the surface. what? 24 years ago hakim bey sits in an apartment somewhere in new york, writing. 20 years later some kid picks it up, knows nothing but the sweet sound of words rippling off his tongue. now I look back in retrospect and understand it within a background of cheesy americana 90s 00s pay-it-forward tantra-and-mysticism mentality, but it still works for me, still toggles the right organ stops, the roof opens up, I see the side of a brick building sloping down and sideways trapezoidal perspectival, etc. etc.

clearly obvious but operating nonetheless.

from the top of roofs the sky is always lower, denser, weightier, about to come crashing down. from the top of roofs distances always change, zoom in and out, the precarious knowledge of a self against a sky above a structure, monolithic presence slumbering underneath here this place here at midnight, 1am, 2am.

==



immediate experience. saturday I may go to a party. sunday I will bike forty two miles on car-free streets, and then go to a party with friends where I will lie on the ground and cut up a christie's catalog, put jasper johns on rauschenberg, lewitt on construction paper. we'll have fun. some beers later most of us will stumble out of the apartment all heady and lightheaded, and in the sparkling grid of the ues will try to form constellations out of windows the same way that subway journeys spell out words. the upper east side will be empty in that characteristic way it always is, like the upper west side, like the smell of the parents having gone to bed while the kids are in bed reading, some analogy so direct it ought not to make sense but still does evoke a lot for me. but right now in brooklyn the cat goes mrkgnao, there's nine people sleeping here, it's home. and still I will lie awake in bed and think about things to think about.

This was 15 years, 26 days ago

it's cool tonight, breeze coming in through open windows, et cetera.

coming uptown I wait at the platform, enter the train. all of a sudden I notice that there's something different in the air so I take my headphones off and look around, gauge directions, locations, attitudes.

there's always a specific way in which a car becomes settled, people nestling into familiar modes of transportation. when people who are new come here there's a stiffness, an unfamiliarity or a wariness that comes out through body language, muscles not quite fully relaxed maybe, invisible spaces delinated in air. watch out. I sat next to such a couple for fifty streets one day and had to encounter the sort of silent carefulness humming auratic around their presence, found myself unconsciously taking on this attitude.

tonight something's different -- maybe it's the night warmth, but this car seems to be receptive, everybody tuned in and sharp, gentle buzzing like the line noise coming through an expectant microphone that's just been plugged in, antennas that've just been turned. everywhere I look there's someone looking back at me. there's a strange openness. whenever something happens on a train everyone looks in the same direction; this train feels like this, except that nothing is happening. everybody is oriented towards each other. suddenly I get a sense of family, some sort of strange unity. it's hard to explain this subway language, the invisible dance, the way in which people situate themselves in relation to each other. it's even harder to describe when this language changes, when shifts occur and the typically mute backdrop of people standing becomes an altogether readable canvas.

after I get off and walk a half a block in this weather, in this air, I pretend to understand.

This was 15 years, 26 days ago

I just finished William Gibson's Pattern Recognition a few days ago, and it's been bouncing in my head. A few thoughts as a means of productive procrastination from my paper on narrativity and stillness in anime.

1) Gibson reads very very much like Don DeLillo, except that Gibson's narratives involve plot much more than DeLillo's does. I'd say that there's an effect from this that designates DeLillo as 'literature', while Gibson is supposedly on the peripheries of literature, just acceptable within academic discourse. This, despite the fact that Jameson and others have written about Gibson (invoking his excellent "conspiracy is the poor man's cognitive mapping" quote), and that Gibson really isn't writing about science fiction but a very slightly alternate form of the current, the now. There's a whole slew of discussions on genre and the hierarchy that ensues from genre divisions which I really don't want to take part, in except to say that: I say it's better to stand outside of genre, the way that you'd stand outside of disciplines in recognition of the middle 'table' of mappings and categorizations that Foucault conceives of as operating between perception and logic. Partitions without any basis.

Anyways, I argue that long, involved plots (and I'm not dissing these by any means) tend to eventually become diegetic, just because of the fact that a sufficient amount of information needs to be transmitted clearly in order to deal with the amount intertwining and interweaving that a complex narrative has to have. Or, the other option is to portray a complex plot as a series of fragmented perceptions, centered around the first-person perspective gleefully lost in a freewheeling miasma of events, having given up some sense of unity or clarity. There's this opposition between clarity and perception, portrayed and perceived chaos that runs along the lines of diegesis/mimesis within the complex (and dare I say?) postmodern novel.

What Gibson does is that he intertwines both, and he pulls it off nearly successfully, I think. Often this takes the form of a very nicely detailed focus on the small events, little pieces of curling gaffer's tape on a leather jacket, and so on -- but I didn't mind, it worked for me.

There's another whole set of predilections given to mimetic narratives that I think sci-fi always has to struggle against; or maybe the narrative is mimetic but things happen. It's as if the conception of 'uselessness' -- that is, the Kant-influenced notion of aesthetics, that things are aesthetic because they lack use and we are detached from interest -- is relevant here. If 'use' for the narrative is mapped to its ability to depict concrete events, then a useless, disinterested narrative is that in which, maybe, nothing happens and a lot is said. Which is often the case in DeLillo's novels -- I'm thinking Underworld and White Noise, both which I enjoyed immensely. So when the counterpart to these novels is Gibson, with his narratives in which many, many things do happen, is this the reason why he is considered to teeter on the edge of 'discussability' within an academic context?

And granted, he is discussed sometimes by big names which is awesome, and comp.lit. is probably liberal enough to take whatever it wants and to look at it in a fascinating and interesting way. And that's the way it should be. And I can only speak for my self -- at least for me, I feel this invisible tug that I constantly have to resist, that seeks to discern Gibson from DeLillo and White Noise from Pattern Recognition not on the basis of style or technique but on the basis of subject matter or plot, or rather maybe on the density of plot, an aesthetics of uselessness.

2) What Gibson and many other sci-fi writers love is a) immersion and b) a homogeneity of heterogeneity. Immersion is straightforward: the first page probably doesn't make sense until you've read through a bit; in that way, the narrative first makes you aware of the sheer otherness of this world, then indoctrinates you and brings you inside. After this, you won't be able to read the first page anymore with the same confusion you first had. This happens in Snow Crash, Neuromancer, numerous other short stories, etc, etc, and it happens in Pattern Recognition.

I like this. I mean, it's pretty standard, especially in sci-fi, but I like the idea of a generated one-way perception; once you've done this adjustment, had the sense of bewilderment (which might be something like an extremely diluted version of the isolation you get when traveling (alone) in a different place), there's no way to have it again. The familiarity with both the characters as well as the technology/environment/language/custom of scene can't be lost, unless you actually forget the book entirely and come back years later to read it again.

As for a homogeneity of heterogeneity: what I mean by this is Gibson will often say depict society as a freewheeling mass of discrete identities, all clashing and rebounding off of each other. Different political groups all with their own agendas, a bunch of micronarratives, maybe. Like this:

"On the far shore, a vast cathedral, and on its own little island a statue of quite unthinkable awfulness. Her Lonely Planet tells her it's Peter the Great, and must be guarded, else local aesthetes blow it up."

I'm sort of thinking about the "postmodern nominalism" that Jameson talks about, in which "the name must also express the new, and fashion: what is worn-out, old-fashioned, is only useful as a cultural marker". The phrase "local aesthetes" serves to wrap up and incarnate a group seemingly hellbent on pursuing aesthetics. There's a necessary singlemindedness characterized by invoking these brief descriptions as if they explain it all: "the Rickson's having been created by Japanese obsessives driven by passions having nothing at all to do with anything remotely like fashion." And this is joyous in a certain way, I like it, there's a vast sprawling heterogeneity of groups and individuals all doing their own thing, an absolute fragmentation.

What happens, though, is that the narrative becomes populated with a massive number of characters that are relatively flat. It's a sort of chaotic macro heterogeneity created at the expensive of homogeneity at the local level -- as opposed to the opposite, maybe a clearly defined and simple narrative with a few deeply complicated characters. I'm not complaining too much -- I acknowledge there's only so much you can do in a few hundred-paged-book. But this is why, in my opinion, DFW's Infinite Jest is such a masterpiece -- there's so much detail packed into every single multifaceted corner; a single pursesnatching (or should I say heart-snatching) event spiders out into all directions, into all characters. That's also the reason why IJ is over a thousand pages and has footnotes.

And in addition, I say, that's also not the way groups work. The way Gibson (and Stephenson, and many other writers) depicts his societies, they are constituted of little globules of personality so uniformly different that it seems as if there is no mainstream. Maybe this is because Pattern Recognition and other novels are so focused on the peripheral societies, but there aren't very many American Idols, no discussion of NPR or New York Times-like entities, large groups that generate spaces of sharedness around which people congregate. Everyone seems to watch cable and have 500+ channels in the sci-fi narratives; everyone's on a highly specialized website narrowly bounded by a very intimate community. CNN is mentioned a few times in Pattern Recognition, I think, but I don't get the sense that F:F:F, the underground and tight-knit forum, is especially underground. Or -- if I do, it's because of the narrow array of avatars mentioned to exist on the forum: Parkaboy, Mama Anarchia, Maurice, Ivy, Filmy. "There are perhaps twenty regular posters on F:F:F, and some much larger and uncounted number of lurkers." But this isn't so -- the Footage is depicted as having many different fans all across the world.

The sense of widespread obsession necessary to depict the breadth and vastness of the internet clashes with an artificial intimacy necessary to depict the specificity and marginal status of this tiny internet community. Community and intimacy clash -- and this is the story of mainstream versus marginal, homogeneity versus heterogeneity, embedding itself in Gibson's narrative on the level of literary technique and description. Really, not all groups are similarly marginal, though. Rather than a homogeneous heterogeneity, accuracy would mean a heterogeneous heterogeneity. Or if, as Lyotard argues, postmodernity is characterized by no longer having grand narratives, then really there should be no grandnarratives concerning the lack of grandnarratives. In this now, narratives both grand and miniscule survive together. CNN next to F:F:F?

This was 16 years, 21 days ago

I'm up far too late. I should sleep. Before I do in this interim moment I realize the preciousness of this moment, my acute awareness of my presence, the clarity of focus I am awarded for my youth.

towards, towards.

This was 16 years, 25 days ago

tonight is probably deep and lengthly and stretches far lengthwise depthwise, a giant sheet hanging in the air extending further. In any loft or one-bedroom apartment could be the makings of a novel.

43 years ago aram saroyan types a word, not even paratactic, just before leaving his hollow obelisk to slip through tunnels beneath the surface. what? 24 years ago hakim bey sits in an apartment somewhere in new york, writing. 20 years later some kid picks it up, knows nothing but the sweet sound of words rippling off his tongue. now I look back in retrospect and understand it within a background of cheesy americana 90s 00s pay-it-forward tantra-and-mysticism mentality, but it still works for me, still toggles the right organ stops, the roof opens up, I see the side of a brick building sloping down and sideways trapezoidal perspectival, etc. etc.

clearly obvious but operating nonetheless.

from the top of roofs the sky is always lower, denser, weightier, about to come crashing down. from the top of roofs distances always change, zoom in and out, the precarious knowledge of a self against a sky above a structure, monolithic presence slumbering underneath here this place here at midnight, 1am, 2am.

This was 17 years, 20 days ago

Gosh. That stuffcalendar thing got too tiring. So this: partly as a self-reminder, a notice board. Plus, the process of finding these things means I get to see things more often.

Vik Muniz! At PS1! Through May 7th.
http://www.ps1.org/ps1_site/content/view/223/102/

ITP Spring Show 2007:
"A festival of interactive sight, sound and technology from the student artists and innovators at ITP"
Tuesday, May 8, 5-9 pm:: Wednesday, May 9, 5-9 pm
http://itp.nyu.edu/show/spring2007/

Boston Cyberarts Festival 2007: April 20-May 6
- Aw shucks, in Boston. Perhaps next year?
http://bostoncyberarts.org/

Columbia Visual Arts MFA Thesis Show:
May 6 - May 27, Wed-Sun 2 - 6pm.
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/news/07/05/images/thesisShow.jpg

chameckilerner: EXIT
May 1–5 (Tuesday–Saturday) 8pm. $10.
NYTimes Review. At the Kitchen.
- I am told that this is good.
http://www.thekitchen.org/

Suupaa-pop: Package Design from Japan
From the AIGA Gallery. To May 25th.
http://www.aiga.org/content.cfm/exhibition-suupaa-pop
- I missed their design competition exhibit -- this looks interesting, hopefully not exoticizing.

---

US <--> limited.

This was 17 years, 21 days ago

Homes are funny things; houses are funny places. So is my attachment to a concept not yet mine. Some desire for domesticity and groundedness, now, some place to live. I have these plans, drawings, projects, ideas, concepts. They are dormant, nascent, unborn, currently in conception. Summer's coming, approaching, dawning, surfacing. It's 6pm; the sun's setting, sinking, settling, sighing.

:for a place, place, place, place, mine, mine, mine, mine. I want to possess material objects that were made to be possessed, have them in my possession, have them be my objects, have these attributes aligning towards me. This is his chair. That is his bicycle. The way he holds that book means that the spine curves to a certain degree. I want to own things, and to have the power to break them and to make them no longer mine, sit in the knowledge of that power and to not exercise it.

want want want want need need need need want want want want need need need need.

things like: chairs, tables, glasses, pots, tables. lamps. clocks.
not things like: sunglasses, televisions, stereos, cars, electronics, heaters, fans.

---

Whenever I type something here I re-evaluate what this place is; a place of constant self-censorship intersecting with mild exhibitionism, run by some desire to document, archive, accumulate. I suppose that most of the time I write for myself in the future who looks back at the past -- what changed, from four years back? Five?

I've become unhappy with myself, because I suspect that the range of thought processes I've been going through are slower, lesser, half-assed and half-hearted. To be honest, I've become lazier, more negligent, too forgiving of myself. 'it's okay, next time.' And concurrently, I can look back and see these ideas collapsing under the weight of a scarcity of mind; slackness, looseness, without some kind of propulsion tension...

If I look forward onto myself looking back, will I say, "I wish I had looked more forward, more often, thought about how much more I would have later looked backwards and wished I had looked more forward, more often?"

----->(<----(--->))