Cam

Dream 1/25: In the dream, we are driven downstairs by a black family living upstairs, through the door. They spray us with water, like how you spray a cat, and we respond in terror. I thought it was your house, and so I was naturally confused. I didn't say anything. It seemed like it was all normal to you, though--all routine. Down the stairs. Down the stairs, I familiarized myself with your things—the record player and the records, the movie projector, the books on the table, the art on the walls. The walls were yellow, and suddenly I felt feverish. I needed to take a shower. I left the door open, though, hoping that you would come in and see me naked. I did this not only with a sense of thrill but also expectation; you were always around, always looking at me in ways that I suspected something. I guess I just--maybe it was repression, like I wanted to be objectified or passionately taken. I longed for this, really. In the other room, you were putting on a tuxedo for some reason and kept hurrying me. “We’re going to be late! You’re making us late!” things like that. I left the door open, and I was waiting for you to come in and speak to me directly, so that you could see my naked body. I had it all rehearsed in my head. I would strip you from the tuxedo and we would roll around on the floor wet. You did walk in, eventually. “We’re going to be late!” and then a pause and then, in a self-conscious, self-centered, piggish voice, you say, “Oh no,” as if you were mocking an exclamation, “Cameron’s naked.” And that was it. You walked out and I dried myself off trying to pinpoint what emotions I was feeling, trying to piece together what clunky performance just occurred, really on both sides. The image was fleeting, the wet rolling, but it lingered as I dried myself off. I fell into it, trying to find memory there. When I walked out of the shower, you weren’t there. I wasn’t surprised. It wasn't like you left; I don’t think you were ever here. I am house-sitting. I sit down on the leather couch naked and hit play a movie on the projector. I feel void, wanting something inside, an action unplanned. I can't recall what I am watching. Everything was still, everything silent.

Some of those who I interact with in the academic black box--some of whom are well-respected scholars in their respective dying fields--have never struggled with language, and thus, have never encountered what I can only call "life." This is not to say that language and life are one in the same. Even though I am a rhetoric graduate student, I hate rhetoric and am counting down the days until I will be freed of its jargon of "epistemic shifts" and what other Habermassean or Foucauldian nonsense that aims to argue life as language.

My sense of language and life are both simple and complex. Language is simple in that to struggle with it, I merely read something or listen to someone speak and recognize that I cannot follow; there are words that I do not recognize, semantic layers that I lack access to. My first inclination is to consult a dictionary, but these, too, are viral: dictionaries preserve a certain representation of fixed reality and fixed meaning, or, if they claim not to, as the "linguistic" or "rhetorical shift" do, they use words like "prescriptive" to attempt to alienate users from observers. Observers are scientists, or something like that. Observers think in a "metalinguistic" manner, and thus, produce "transdiscursive" discourse. This is still language. Those are terms. Look them up. Here, we fall into what Carl Hempel called the circularity of scientific explanation: one thing is defined by another and another by another, until the process arrives full circle. A father is a male parent; parent is a father and a mother. Hempel solved this with positivism, namely, by saying that the things we can point to are the things that exist, creating an epistemology grounded in a form of concrete scientific realism and logic. If I cared less about reality, I would adopt positivism. Reality is that I have to deal with words and phrases like the "trap of totalization" and "the end of the Grand Narrative" and the "radical irreducibility of the political" on a daily basis. These phrases bring in me a sense of confusion but also net a sphere of potential semantic meanings. They are at once unclear and clear. They are clear in that I know the words, and they are clear in that I can put the words together, but they are unclear in that I have no grounding in their history, no way of establishing a subjective self within the phrase.

The alternatives, mainly phenomenology, would have me say, "Oh, what you read is what you get. How does it make you feel? You are participating in history, at most: an internal history, the history of the self and the idea." I don't buy that. I want these words to mean something without Hegelian, Kantian, Hussrelian, Marxist myths. I want to understand. And it seems like everything is set up so that I transform from human to parrot; understanding is not an option, only discourse.

I guess there comes a time when any conscious person asks his or herself what is worth living for and what energies to devote for what cause. Solidifying a life plan is hard, mainly because I am young and know very little about life. I'm bound to make mistakes and not even realize them. Life is full of misunderstandings, mistakes, and red herrings; I am aware. I don't need a PSA. But life as a force, not a biological force but a force of what I can only call the soul, that which is detached from my genetics but immanent--life as a force directs and justifies actions, provides energy to continue, to make it through. I feel that I need to empower myself in order to understand a purpose. This is the only choice given by life. And this empowering comes only with struggle, with misunderstandings and trouble, with crying. I cannot hold on to memises in hopes of success. The university is wheezing, and its wheezing draws me in, but I know her song is like the Siren's. The rocks are ahead. The dream is imaginary. If I am to have space to think or to act, it must be a space that I provide for myself. Each minute is at least partially mine, and each minute must be spent strategically. Tactics must be employed to take back space and time. Tactics must be employed to lead me through the odyssey, i will return in this vessel to my Ithica, my land of life and meaning and purpose.

Dream 1/12: I dreamt that I was trying to comfort Jiang Qing last night. She was in her old age; we were in my parent’s old basement before it was finished. It was mid-day outside, the yellow sun was shining through the windows, but it was dark and cold where we were standing. She stood about five two; her hair brushed back, cut just under the ear. Her face was red and wrinkled, like an apricot. It was clear to me that she was embarrassed, her head drooping forward. Sometimes she would smile awkwardly, like she had something to say but couldn't bring herself to it. Her lips quivered, and her hair falling out of place, she rolled her eyes up to look at me, when suddenly
she broke into a violent fit of tears:

"The Nazi's are after me! I have to kill myself! There is no other option!"
She said she could see them rustling from the window; they were out there in the fields.
She said she could see the shine of their boots as she walked past the corner shadows.
I tried to tell her that there were no more Nazis, that she was just being paranoid, that everything would be fine. Nazis weren’t a concern!

But she couldn't understand. All she could do was cry, drop on the floor, cry louder, harder. No words came from her winced face. Her teeth clenched, her gums showed. Her eyes squinted shut — she had a flashback:

She was young, Mao by her side, the sun shining warmly.
They were walking through a rice field, she smiled,
looked thinner next to her blockish husband.
They walked hand in hand sometimes; sometimes her hands were in her
green jacket pockets. She laughed a young and sophisticated laugh — her laugh
was all you could hear, echoing softly from all corners of the golden rice field.
The rice rustled against a gentle breeze. It was cold again,
and then there was no one.
The empty field was gray, still and silent.
The soft blue sky was the only color, the only subject.
The rest of the dream was blue.
Sometimes there would be clouds and birds
passing through it's mind, like phantoms.
Sometimes the sky was only the sun:
a radiant blue, but shining warmly.
Everything was floating. Everything contained.
Everything the same.
Blue.

I think this is pretty funny. A friend of mine found this on Craigslist, and I'm pretty sure it's talking about me. It was posted a couple days after the Jandek show--a group of friends and I went to Jong Kok after and were talking about Golden Girls.



"You, Me, Kim Chi and Bea (Arthur)


I overheard the table next to us talking about "Golden Girls" at Jong Kok.
I glanced up and immediately noticed your soft hair strewn across your downcast eyes.
You appeared sad even though you were in the company of good friends.
How can someone so beautiful seem so sad?
I can sense a deep sorrow within.
You deserve someone to nurture you.

I can sense beneath your timidity an unrestrained animalistic passion, which I hope to unleash.
I hope to cradle you in my arms as we savor every fleeting moment.
At dawn the chariot of Apollo will greet us.
I will nuzzle your phallus as a puppy nuzzles its mothers teat, gently licking away till the last bits of milk are spent...
...and I am fully engorged and both are satisfied.

Plant your seed upon the garden of my tongue, and I will plant mine upon your taut hindquarters.
Srsly, I could bounce a quarter off that thing;)

...but I digress.


I feel as if I have flown too close to the sun--like Icarus, I will be cast down to my demise....

contact me. "

http://baltimore.craigslist.org/mis/1481493187.html

No one seems to understand anything I say, ever. This is an argument that I had on facebook. I don't know Rob or David; both are JHU students. I was trying to push the point that the news representation is romanticizing an act of lethal violence.

• Vivian:
  My entire newsfeed is flooded with this article (thank you, Hopkins kiddies). Proof that there are way too many Asians at JHU:
  
  Johns Hopkins student kills intruder with samurai sword, police say -- baltimoresun.com
  
  A Johns Hopkins University student armed with a samurai sword killed a man who broke into the garage of his off-campus residence early Tuesday, a Baltimore police spokesman said. According to preliminary reports, a resident of the 300 block of E. ...
  
  
• Cameron:
  Are you serious? That's so fucked up! Someone steals a Playstation or a laptop and gets his head cut off by some psycho-violent, samurai sword wielding kid? That's so fucked up. My heart goes out to the victim.
  
  
• Rob:
  I think it's a bit different than that Cameron.
  The guy heard a commotion and went into his own space and was lunged at by a trespasser who was a repeat offender.
  
  In addition, the burglar had one hand mostly severed and some lacerations on his chest, I think it's possible that the person with the sword wasn't trying to kill, just to beat the guy away.
  
  Still unfortunate that he had to die for crime, but the burglar is hardly a victim.
  
  
• Cameron:
  In this day and age, I think this sort of death is completely contemptible. The way it is being framed--as a 'yey! look, a JHU student defended himself with a samurai sword!' attitude--puts the emphasis on the sword itself and the novelty of the killing. Idealizing some sort of romanticized Samurai heroism takes away from the actual brutality of the death, not to mention how unnecessary the killing was. Why would an undergraduate student have a sharpened Samurai sword, anyways?
  
  
• David:
  He was in his own home and was attacked by a man with 29 prior convictions who had been released from jail on his most recent conviction, car theft, less than 72 hours before. I find it novel that a sword was used but would be just as satisfied had the student defended himself with a handgun. If you would choose instead to cower while your home were burglarized for the second time in less than 24 hours, that's your prerogative, but have a bit of respect for those who stand up for themselves.
  
  
• Cameron:
  But you have to keep in mind that the student could not have known about the criminal record. And more importantly, I think your implications raise an ethical question: Is it alright to kill the man because of his criminal record? Does his criminal record even constitute any sort of relevance to the situation? When we read the story in the newspaper, the appeal of the criminal record just seems to be a device to justify the burglar’s cruel and unusual means of death. I think if the burglar was killed with a handgun, it would be a different story altogether—probably not one which would gain as much attention as it has.
  
  Regardless, the thrust of my earlier ethical claim wasn’t meant to condemn or affirm the student’s actions in the event—of whether it was right or wrong for him to defend himself given the situation— but of the way the story is being publicly framed: as some sort of idealistic and romanticized act of honorary defense (appealing to the image of the samurai), and with a heavy emphasis on the means of the defense (the sword). The framing downplays the brutality of the death and emphasized a false heroism of the defender. To me, and maybe not to you, this seems distasteful and disrespectful to the one who lost his life.
  
  
• David:
  You're quite right--let's ignore the means of death and anything preceding the act itself. Instead, we know only that a student armed himself and protected his life and his property (castle doctrine). I find this justified and, indeed, admirable. He could have let his property be stolen or allowed himself to be harmed and possibly killed. And I reiterate, if you would rather let yourself be so violated, that's your choice--but I honor those who do possess the courage and self-respect to protect themselves.
  
  
• Rob:
  I agree that the "samurai's" actions were justified and I do admire his courage.
  
  We might disagree over that point, but I hope we would all agree that the situation would be better had the robber not died.

A sentimental scene from a movie

Why do you read such books!
the furious governess shrilled
at the pink child, embarrassed,
who replied in a sentimental tone:

I was never the best at anything,
as the stories always begin,
...and books don't talk back,
They don't laugh at you-- they
don't even know you exist.
They just sit there:
In their stupid little world,
waiting, unaware that they
are characters, their world
merely a text.

The Wheel of Fortune

Curtains open on our young hero in an hour glass, pounding,
the Magician, brooding, pacing:
“Release the sand, water boys!”
Two Fools slide across stage, turn the Wheel;
the red sand begins to fall, our man is in danger.
Space and time slipping away, he remembers:

The beach was cold, but they were warm, they were
Sand, water, boys, release: the
Lovers, together, alive, unbridled.
They danced beneath their Mother Moon,
and Father Sun smiled proudly:
“Boys, water the sand: release
the flower.” And they did.

But now our man looks into the eyes of Death,
“Water boys! The sand! Release!”
Where is two (VI) when he is one (XII)?
This is where the one meets three,
And the third penetrates the glass.

* * *

The clumsy creators under the Sun
--Magicians, Lovers, Fools--
they dance all day, and then at night,
they sing their song to the Moon:

“If I was the flower, you’d be the soil.
If I was the soil, you’d be the rain.
If I was the rain, you’d be the flower.
Never the same, never the same.”

A lonely star has found its mate,
but, alas, our Man is Hanged.

"Art used to be a game of nuts in May, children would go gathering words that had a final ring, then they would exude, shout out the verse, and dress it in dolls' bootees, and the verse became a queen in order to die a little, and the queen became a sardine, and the children ran hither and yon, unseen...Then came the great ambassadors of feeling, who yelled historically in chorus:
Psychology Psychology hee hee
Science Science Science
Long live France
We are not naive
We are successive
We are exclusive
We are not simpletons
and we are perfectly capable of an intelligent discussion.
But we, DADA, don't agree with them, for art isn't serious, I assure you, and if we reveal the crime so as to show that we are learned denunciators, it's to please you, dear audience, I assure you, and I adore you."
-Tristan Tzara, "Monsieur Antipyrine's Manifesto", 1916, pp. 2

I have for the most part felt productive. The days go by quickly, and I fill them with as many thoughts and activities as I can will myself to engage. Yesterday, I went to a book trade and purchased three books: a book of criticism by Northrop Frye, a biography of Derek Jarman, and a book on hermetic theology. I have been re-reading Paradise Lost--a book when I wake up. I mark my way through it, as to promote active reading, feverishly scanning the dictionary and the encyclopedia for esoteric words and images. I am learning a lot.

Today I saw the new Disney Pixar movie Up. It was surprisingly depressing! I cried at three different points, the first of which during the first twenty minutes. Over lunch, Edward and I were talking about these Disney Pixar films. Mostly, I was questioning their intended audience; while watching Up, the children sitting to my left kept on asking questions like, “Where did the kids from the beginning go?” and “What does that note say?” Both of these events are key to the narrative. And it got me thinking about montage literacy and the new approach to children’s films where background to the film is given at the very beginning in a short montage--or they will transition from one time period to another using montages, or whatever. They did it in Wall-E, too. And in The Incredibles. Children at an early age don’t have the narrative literacy to make sense of montages. Montage logic is in no way a priori; it takes time to develop an understanding of film. Up had a very complex story structure, too. I don’t know--they really should have marketed it better to adults. The whole time I was sitting in the theatre, the children seemed disinterested and confused. Three kids started playing tag up front. One started pointing at the screen with a laser pointer. All the while, I was crying Niagara Falls.

Edward and I were also talking about Wall-E and the sorts of overlooked anti-Christian sentiments that go into robotic romance. It is to my understanding that genderless robots cannot procreate and thusly are an abomination the same as homosexuals. I felt that it was insulting not to hear any backlash against Wall-E. Edward felt that the genders of the robots were implied so strongly that it gave a sense of identity to the viewer, regardless of the genderless reality suggested of the definition of robots. This got me thinking: Obviously, what Christians dislike about homosexuality is not the abomination or whatever liturgical safety they cling to, but the otherness, the feeling of difference. Given this, and given how, in literature, we can identify otherness in characters, we can avoid identifying with certain salient aspects of a narrative, how is it that these sorts of problems are remedied in film? When we are demanded by the camera’s eye to project ourselves in suggestively gendered robots, the general public has no qualms. I don’t think this identity would solidify as quickly (if at all) in literature. We cannot identify with Hamlet as he auto-anatomizes his own emotions, oscillating between both sides of himself; the best we can do is ‘go along with’ him, to reserve identity, yet suspend scrupulous judgment of his actions and acting. In literature, this ‘going along with’ seems to be a place where we can dig the deepest of thoughts of otherness: we are never given a chance to fully capture Ophelia until, transformed by grief and sorrow, she gives a memorialized “woman’s speech” upon succumbing to a muddy death. The feelings we derive from Ophelia’s speech are not from ourselves projected, but from a recognition of ourselves as voyeurs, listening in and identifying ‘along with’. In film, ironically enough, there is no voyeurism in the same sense. We are forced to be what we are shown, think what we have been placed into. We are Wall-E or Eve, man, woman. We are the heterosexual directors and nothing more can be ferreted out of the longed-for spectacle. It is strange how film lacks the ability to even suggest otherness, as everyone can be someone, as, indeed, everyone is someone--even in these new Pixar quasi-children’s cartoons. Wall-E and Eve cannot be in an abominable relationship because, even without suspending our imagination, we are them. In a literal sense, the suggested metaphor at the end of their child being the world seems to transcend figurative speech and etch into our minds an unrepresented, unsupported "truth". This relationship is alright because they do not make us feel uncomfortable; after all, how could they? We force them to be what we are unwillingly. They will never exist as robots. There will never be a robot in cinema.

eternity begins and ends in bed. the day and night are measured in your eyelids.

I tutored a girl today who was writing a paper on a Rita Dove poem. There is this part in the poem where the little girl talks about how she would baptize her earlobes with rosewater to forget about her dead father, and that reminded me of Sissy Spacek in Bandlands, the part where Holly writes sentences on the roof of her mouth with her tongue so that no one could read. Something about that connection made me feel really sad all of the sudden.


I fell asleep while taking a test in my Philosophy of Science class. I think the teacher thinks I'm an idiot now. I was too tired to think of how to fully answer the question on Duhem and his form of underdetermination. The girl next to me copied my test when I fell asleep. I think she will be disappointed in herself when she gets her test back.

I have a lot of papers to grade but no place in my patience to grade them. I want to see new faces smiling and walk around outdoors. I wouldn't mind a nice intellectual conversation for once, too. Where do I want to be right now? Who do I want to be with?

I forgot that, when soaked in libations, words flow as smooth as soldiers: trained, ordered, and with a mission. Though I still am disappointed with both the Internet and the real world, I'm getting better with the issue of loving myself. When focusing on others, less on literary behemoths, the world seems very bleak, to say the least. I guess I never really pulled my nose out of my books long enough to truly accept that, yes, this is what we have become. It is not idealistic perceptions of Marx or hedonistic fantasies of pacification. I live in a world that is decadent enough to consider even me intelligent. Degeneration works quite literally and obviously, though we may like to entertain ourselves enough to think it works in mysterious ways. It's comforting that way.

As he traveled the hillside, Xu Yen of the Yan Xian came upon a scholar of seventeen or eighteen. The young man, who was lying by the roadside, said that his feet hurt and asked for a lift in the goose cage which Xu was carrying. At first, Xu thought he was joking. But the scholar got into the cage, and the cage looked no larger than before while the scholar looked no smaller. He sat down quietly beside the two geese, and they did not seem to mind him. Xu picked up the cage again but found it no heavier.

Further on, he stopped to rest under a tree when the scholar, coming out of the cage, offered to treat him to a meal. When Xu accepted with pleasure, the scholar took from his mouth a copper tray laid with all manner of delicacies. The utensils were of copper, and the food had a rare flavor and fragrance. After several cups of wine, the scholar told Xu: “I have a girl with me. May I ask her to join us?”

“Certainly.”

Then, from his mouth, the scholar produced a girl of fifteen or sixteen, richly dressed and amazingly lovely. She sat down, smiled, and feasted with them. After the meal, the scholar, slightly tipsy from drinking too much plum wine, went to go lie down.

The girl saw this as her opportunity. “Though I have married this main,” said the girl to Xu, “as a matter of fact, I hate him. I have brought my lover with me. Now that my husband is asleep, I shall call him out. Please do not say anything.”

“Certainly not,” agreed Xu.

Then the girl produced from her mouth another young fellow of twenty-three or four, intelligent and charming, who chatted with Xu. Just then, the scholar started to wake, and the girl took a silk screen from her mouth to hide the new man. The scholar made the girl join him in bed. The newcomer then told Xu, “Though that girl is fond of me, I don’t care for her. I have brought another girl with me and would like to see her now. Please don’t let anyone know.”

“Certainly not,” Xu once again agreed.

Then the second man took from his mouth a girl of twenty or so. They feasted and amused themselves until they heard the scholar stirring.

“Those two are getting up,” the second man said. He popped the girl into his mouth.
The first girl returned and told Xu, “The scholar is getting up now.”
She swallowed her friend and sat alone with Xu.
Then the scholar came out and told him, “I am sorry I slept for so long. You must have been bored sitting here all by yourself. As it is growing late, I should bid you farewell.”

With that, he swallowed hte girl and the utensils, leaving only a big copper tray for Xu. This tray was some two feet across, and in parting, the scholar said, “I have nothing worth giving you, but keep this as a souvenir.”

During the Taiyuan period (376 C.E. - 396 C.E. ) Xu served as an advisor in the Imperial Library and showed the tray to Minister Chang III, who discovered from the inscriptions that it was made in the third year of Yong Bing (60 C.E.).

The other day in my bioethics class, one of the students questioned the why the validity of Don Marquis’s ad hoc argument on abortion was questionable. The professor became side tracked on the argument form of why ad hoc arguments were considered invalid, and began to propose to the class that he had asked his dissertation adviser this question when he was in grad school. The dissertation adviser did not know the answer but advised my professor to stay away from them anyhow.

In this anecdote, I see two things at play: the discourse of a philosophical community (mental, as well as verbal), and discourse’s strong stance on the separation between rhetoric and philosophy. To the latter, the separation is most famously due to Socrates in Plato’s numerous dialogue like The Protagoras and The Gorgias and The Phaedrus where Socrates links the sophists--the main performers and teachers of rhetoric--with unethical behavior. The syllogism then reads that sophists are rhetoricians, sophists are unethical, and therefore rhetoric is unethical; this is a very simple logical error: the syllogistic logical fallacy of the illicit minor. However, since then, philosophy and rhetoric have been split. Aristotle, critical of his teacher’s faulty logic and emphasis on the metaphysical, realized the importance and use of rhetoric as a means of leading people toward happiness. He also realized the flaw, one which Plato also discusses in The Republic: Rhetoric can be used to persuade for a teleology which is unnatural through convincing argument forms (like the ad hoc). But it was for this reason that Aristotle allowed and encouraged the study of rhetoric as it was through scrupulous rhetorical study that people would learn ways of persuasion as well as recognizing truly illogical argument forms. I think of the study of rhetoric as a sort of rhetorical immune system building. Aristotle also limited rhetoric to the political sciences, specifically to the supposed philosopher kings who philosophized the right way of doing things and used rhetoric as a means of leading humanity toward functionality and ultimately eudemonia. For the quotidian to use rhetoric would be immoral, since it could detract from the philosopher king’s agenda, leading humanity astray from teleology or the natural order of things. Or at least this is what one reading of The Nicomachean Ethics would flush out. There tends to be a lingering question of whether the function of people (and therefore the ethical rightness or wrongness of people's characters) is necessarily intertwined in a person's work. Are ethics personal or political?

I'm sidetracking myself. As I was trying to say, the invalidity of ad hoc arguments has become institutionalized into the discourse of philosophy ever since, later factoring into the established academic tradition of philosophical study. I think it is perhaps because of the institutionalized study of philosophy that ad hoc arguments are seen to be invalid, partially due to history of the tradition and partially due to realization of how rhetoric can affect politics. Creating a rhetorically persuasive argument using an ad hoc argument form is precisely that rhetoric which Aristotle and Plato feared. Aristotle's rhetorical rival, Isocrates, accounted for the fact that this would happen and created his own branch of rhetorical theory based on performance rather than persuasion; he called his pedagogy "philosophia", as true lovers of wisdom are wise in action, not in argument. Today, in this day and age, philosophy does not concern itself with rhetoric as it concerns itself solely with argument and not performance--or at least the analytic tradition does not concern itself with performance. If it does focus on performance or action, it focuses on things abstract like illocutionary speech acts, a very small part of communication or communication theory brooded over for the sake of a coherent analytic counterpart to continental philosophies of language.

And meanwhile, Sarah Palin nearly became our Vice-president. Barack Obama became President-elect Obama. And John McCain's "straight talk" non-rhetoric rhetoric won over the minds of 46% of our population. Ignoring a problem, even historically, does not make it go away. I think my professor's comment regarding ad hoc arguments, as well as the comment he made about his dissertation advisor not knowing why ad hoc arguments were considered invalid, demonstrates the impracticality running through the veins of the institutionalized profession of the philosopher.

So back to school is pretty boring and drunken. Karaoke night didn’t work out. I ordered a pizza, and then it was over. Instead, I watched A Zed & Two Noughts, which, it turns out, is a lot like Dead Ringers, except with a Michael Nyman soundtrack (typical) and a Peter Greenway attitude toward narrative (also typical, obviously). Today, I was supposed to be a TA for a class which I thought was the class I was supposed to TA for, but it turned out that it wasn't. The class I TA for is on Monday. I can't TA for that class. It interferes with that discourse analysis class I am taking, so I'm going to see if I can TA another ethics class in place of that Monday class.

Well, in other news, the apartment is dumb. I have a jock roommate on the wresting team. He has red hair and smokes a lot of pot. He didn't bring anything with him to school except a blanket, a television, and Call of Duty 4 or whatever that game is. Oh, and a computer. Either way, the common room is empty. There is no TV. There was a karaoke screen earlier, but then I got pizza, so that's gone now, too. Things aren't too fun around here. Everyone graduated, so there's no one to challenge me anymore. I went to my first class today and it was boring. I felt college-old, like I ought to audit or something. But I went drunk. I've been drinking every day. Like a lot. Like, this is going to be a semester-long bender, a lot. That's how bad it is now. There's a Chick-fil-a on campus and a Starbucks and a Dunkin Donuts. They fired all the workers, and I feel like it was the solidarity coalitions duty to realize that, if they complained about Sodexo enough but didn't realize the repercussions of getting them off campus, people would be worse off. This one black lady who used to work at the Grill-- I asked her where her friend was. She looked at me all stoic and said, "She din make it." Like as if it was war or something. Fuck, I'm so privileged, and still, I'm a whiney bitch. A drunken whiney bitch.

I haven't puked yet, and I'm gonna try and keep it like that forever. Rumi says that the reason Islamic outlaws libations is because alcohol brings out the inner spirit, the innermost desires and stuff. Most people are angry or sad but mostly self-destructive. Rumi was at peace. For him, drinking was a conversation with God in the garden of his mind. For me, I think it's more like self-deprecation, but like, hide and go seek with that self-deprecation. I'm alone in my room now typing. I am alone, in my room, now, typing... drunk. And I will be hungry soon, I bet. Oh! I know! Let me microwave a fucking burrito! NO! Stoner jock didn't bring a microwave. Neither did Carl. Fuck. I hate this stupid fucking place.

Carl needs academic babysitting and indirectly asked me to academic babysit him. I'm gonna be working as a TA, a writing center tutor, and a wushu coach. On top of that, I'm taking a grad class, two other classes, a training course, and working on my senior thesis on god knows what. Top that off with sporadic anxiety attacks and insomnia and you have hell. I rented this Peter Greenaway TV special on Dante's Inferno, and I would watch it now, but I have a headache. Fuck graduation. Fuck all of this. I don't want to be doing this anymore. But, I mean, I've been bread to think there is no other way, right? Like, where is my television? Where are my burritos? This must be hell, right? Maybe I'll learn something this year. Or maybe I'll go mad. Or maybe I'll buy a TV and a DVD player and some groceries and make Carl get a microwave in exchange for academic babysitting. Maybe, by next week, the stoner jock will come out of his den because he likes the common space more than his barren room. Maybe I'll spend most of my time at Martin's feeling dumb while he talks about a totally different world of non-college brilliance and art and stuff. Maybe anything. Maybe I'll sober up and feel dumb and rewrite this entry but pretend like it's the first time I'm writing it. Maybe this is the rewrite, the re-envisioning, like Death Race from Death Race 2000. I will do this, of course, after I write an entry where I answer a question I originally posed in this entry about a movie where there was this trashy high class woman at a social gathering and she showed someone her scar and said "that was my twin sister... siamese twins". Doesn't that kind of sound like it could be a Peter Greenaway plot, though? I mean, it's sort of like A Zed & Two Naughts, maybe. Shit...

So fucking boring. Shit.

The Will of Freedom

In the prison, the young mystic poet is being held without ransom by the Turanians. A old man, a fellow mystic, sneaks into the prison dressed as a guard. He has brought with him gold to give to the poet so that he may bribe his jailers. The young poet, however, refuses the money, telling the old man, "Friend, there is nothing God has given you which can free me." With this, the old man leaves distressed.

The next day, the man rides into the prison yard not only with gold, but stallions and jewels which excite even the spoiled Turanian king Afrasiab. With the pressure of the kingdom this time, the young poet is once again presented with his liberation, and once again he refuses. "Nothing God has given you can free me, my friends. I am sorry." The guards become infuriated by this proud gesture, and the chief officer of the prison requests from the king Afrasiab permission for the young poet's immediate execution. Permission is granted.

Panicked by the wild turn of events, the old man pleas with God himself to convince the poet to escape. Echoing straight into the heart of the poet, God speaks: "I demand that you live, my child. Accept the freedom provided by the old man and live out your life in mystic divinity, away from the bars of this prison they have caged you in."

As soon as God was finished speaking, a deep breathe escaped the poet's lips. In a calm voice, the poet spoke. "You, my Lord, are like that old man. You do not yet understand what is meant by freedom and what is meant by imprisonment. What can one man truly give to another? What place does freedom have in the hands of these men? In the words of this world? This heart only knows submission. I am a poet, my Lord. I will demonstrate this much to you."

With a smile on his face, the poet sprawled out upon the floor of his cell, and died.

The happy ending of Theodore Sturgeon's short story The World Well Lost will fill your gut with tears and your face with hopelessness. Don't believe me? Well then go fuck yourself. Oh, the loverbirds. The loverbirds.

The first stanza of written_insin's poem "Incision":

Writhed across the satin sheets of lore, scents coalesce the atmosphere
Of a chained and faceless storm
Locks of magenta wilt and whisper
A torture that was only tepid in anticipation
A soft incision, a cut through
The gentle flesh of the valleys requiring constant surveillance
Core of the hurricane, eye of the tempest
Spirals through a bloodletting reign

My analysis:

• "Satin sheets of lore" must imply some sort of universal symbol of someone or something, perhaps mythological, cf. the old gods of lore or the book of lore.
  
• The participial phrase describing the subject of the first sentence, “sense”, is apparently “writhed”. “Writhed”, according to the OED, is a transitive verb which means to be twisted or coiled. In your poem, it is intransitive, though, and the intransitive verb for writhe means to flourish or sprout. I will treat it otherwise, however. I believe you meant it to mean coiling, viz. writhing in pain.
  
• When you say “scents coalesce the atmosphere/Of a chained and faceless storm”, this reads that a smell is taking the atmosphere—i.e. air pressure, water vapor, cold front—and mixing the atmosphere together, assumedly to give it a face. Perhaps the chaining you refer to is due to the atmosphere’s lack of homogeneity; that is, it’s chained up because it’s not conforming to social norms, cf. Bakhtin’s theory of centripetal and centrifugal heterodoxy in Four Essays. This also explains why the storm has no face: he (if I may gender the storm, as I’m sure you intended) has been imprisoned and his face hidden from society. I think the obvious reference here points to Dumas’s The Vicomte of Bragelonne. Please correct me if I am wrong.
  
• The scent and atmosphere, because they’re coiled around the sheets (which are mythological), gives the impression that they come from the sheets or from something which occurred on, in, or to the sheets, such as sex or laundry. Either the smell of laundry or sex is coalescing (riling). What is riling if not a prisoner from the French Revolution, what given the man in the iron mask allusion? I guess this must all be happening in the Bastille. Oh! So what this sentence means exactly is that sex inspires prison revolt! I get it, I get it…. The storming of the Bastille was definitely based on sex and laundry; you’re right. In the core of the French Revolution, there was a feuding dialectic between progeny and cleanliness, sex and laundry. Nice!
  
• On a more universal level, I’m guessing this is about a battle between the Id and the Ego, using the French Revolution as an allegory.
  
• Atmosphere implies air-pressure, which when personified becomes blood-pressure, aiding further credence to the claim that the sent is physiologically exciting the prisoners. Like an “aphrodisiac”, whose aromas produce lasciviousness, the sent is kind of like an “ares-desiac”, a war scent, one similar to the chemicals used to cause revelry in the Vietnam war— Ares, here, being paralleled with Aphrodite to accommodate the image of satin sheets and prison break. Love is war. The battle between Id and Ego, like I said. I really appreciate the Freudian undertones!
  
• Also, going back to that chemical used in Vietnam, I think you actually implied a very cleaver connection which I would not have even caught, had it not been for that blood-pressure/scent connection. Vietnam is a war torn country, destroyed by the French-Indo-Chinese Revolution. This scent seems to relate all back to France. Does this poem jest at the failure of the French Revolution through the evocation of the Vietnam War?
  
• While the “locks” here in the third line may seem to imply bundles, it would not actually make sense to have locks of an abstract color; ergo, the lock this poem speaks of is the other kind of lock, i.e. lock and key. The magenta lock alludes back to the image strand of prison, a flamboyant prison. Or perhaps it alludes to psychedelia—a psychedelic French prison, such as the one Jean Genet’s dream prison in his homoerotic film Un Chant d’Amour. Is Jean Genet the man in the iron mask?
  
• The previous reference to the lack of homogeneity now more clearly is referring to Jean Genet, I feel, as he was imprisoned himself for opposing French culture.
  
• While the word “tepid” in line 4—meaning “lacking force”—is ironic for the image of a prison revolt, it here fits precisely because of Jean Genet’s sexual fetish with the phallic nature of ballistic weaponry.
  
• Backtracking a little, I now see that the “locks” are “wilting” due to the prisoner’s revolt being successful; the “torture” “whispers” for this same reason, too. This is the same way torture whispers in everyday life outside of a prison, much like Michel Foucault’s analysis of power and gaze when analyzing the great Utilitarian Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon in his seminal work Discipline and Punish.
  
• While the line “A soft incision, a cut...” may seem like it is grammatically and pragmatically incorrect or that it follows from no prior statement, it actually shows the disconnection of poetry, metaphor, and metonym. The statement of the incision carves itself out of the poem and arrives at the title of the poem, Incision. The line is an incision itself of grammar. In the image strand of the prison break, prisoners are incising the gates, opening them up; this line does the same to the prison of the poem’s structure, to grammar, and to language.
  
• This notion of incisions, of cutting, now justifies the mythology of the sheets—“the satin sheets of lore”—as this timeless act of hegemonic struggle in language (Id and Ego in representation) acts as a creation myth: more specifically, the creation of freedom. Hence all the references to sex, laundry, and Freud.
  
• The lock can also be seen as a symbol for the vagina, as you put a key in it. I don’t know why I missed that one. Either way, the image strand does not budge. This is a strong piece!
  
• As you mentioned in your message to me, the “valley” in line 6 is meant to be “the valley of the mind, like the grooves on the brain’s surface”. This ties back in to the “writhing” in line one, the coiling, as brain is coiled, as well as the “spirals of bloodletting” in the final line of the stanza. Going back to the global theme of dialectic Id and Ego, the brain can be seen as the location of the prison. When there are no holes in a brain—be the holes from ecstasy or a bludgeoned aphasia or, really, any sort of “mental instability”—the brain is topologically indistinguishably from a sphere.
  
• A sphere is a perfect prison, as there are no entrances or exits, only space. The universe is a sphere with an infinite radius.
  
• Those who have holes in their brains, such as those with “mental instability” like Jean Genet, cannot be entrapped in this sphere prison.
  
• The prisoners, the “mentally unstable”, can break out of prison because of the incision, the holes in the sphere, in the brain, etc. This is how revolution manifests at an ideological and cultural level.
  
• The “core of the hurricane” and the “eye of the tempest” are both metaphors for the hole, the gate, the cervix, the passage to freedom.
  
• Finally, you mention “bloodletting”, which in retrospect was a rather cruel and unsuccessful psychiatric procedure performed most notably by English psychiatrists. Could this reference be a nudging at the universality of this problem of entrapment, this problem of the sphere? It is not just the French Revolution but also the psychiatric revolution. In this final line, are you extending the image strand out of the “eye of the tempest” or the hole in the sphere, the gate of the prison, into contemporary “Generation RX”, born out of English psychiatry? Brilliant!

Tonight I

• saw a movie. I watched The Edge of Heaven, which was the Turkish-German version of a Robert Altman film, most likely Short Cuts. Supposedly, according to the reviewers, it was chock full of notions of diasporic identity issues and didactics of foreign policy, but to read this, you pretty much have to be retarded. Nationality was not an issue. It was about disconnection, distance, dissonance, and the struggle for an emotional reconstruction. That Fossbinder actress, Anna Karina, made it very clear that film was not to be viewed in a nationalistic or didactic lens. There was no focus on emotion. It was the structure. The disconnection.


• saw Sherif, who came back from Iowa for a few days, threw himself a party at his old house, and was bummed when the only people who showed were people from Fredrick and his old roommates. He's loved more than he knows. Most people just don't do things anymore. They spend Fridays alone or at shows alone. Sherif spent most of the time at his own party alone. He started playing a new computer game called Portal. He started playing it on his seventh or eighth beer. And I was on my tenth. Then I left.


• after finding out my favorite Baltimore bar, Club Charles, has been shut down and relocated to like South Carolina or something ridiculous like that, I went to the Copycat Annex to see Martin and his friend, Nate, who does the video for Eats Tapes. The City Paper described Eats Tapes as "the kibosh on whole fields of techno naysaying" and even throws in a little slogan: Techno, heck no? Eat a tape!. They were techno. Very predictable. Scott was there, of course, dancing like a gorilla and being selective as to who he talked to. A quick hi and then he's off. On Tuesday, he asked Edward to go with him to see Weedeater. I need to get over the fact that he liked Edward more than me, I do, but I still feel that he fucks me over more than I deserve, and it's always in subtle and passive ways. I'm probably reading far more into it than is actually there. Either way, some kid who is in Teeth Moutain whose name I forgot already said hi to me. I think the only reason why is because I'm friends with Martin and he wants to be. Owen. His name was Owen. He was pretty much licking Martin's balls, hoping that Martin would acknowledge and endorse his band. He's friends with Scott. That's the other time I met him. And he reads Deleuze (obviously). That's another time I met him, too, at the Mt. Royal Tavern. I forgot him each and every time. I probably shouldn't. Teeth Mountain will probably be really, really big.


• got wasted and dizzy.


• went back to Martin and Drew's to help entertain Eats Tapes and eat food. They were staying at Martin and Drew's for the night cause they were on tour and that's what touring bands do. Over food, there was a lot of Baltimore bashing coming from Nate and we couldn't really deny any of it. Baltimore is a shit hole, but it's one which has soul. It's one you grow to love. Before the bashing, Nate was showing an amazing piece of video art that he bootlegged from a museum in San Francisco . The piece was by a video artist named Mike Kelly, whom I've never heard of but apparently should have and ought to be ashamed of not having heard of him. The piece was pretty amazing, actually. It was on what speculatively goes on in those cliche high school year book photos of events, except it assumed the school to be filled with magick-wielding occultists. There was a focus on Gene Simmons and norse gods, Garth Brooks and Southern Baptists, wiccan auditorium dancing, Aleister Crowley walks in the forest, school shrubbery reciting Americanized Percy Shelly and Lord Byron sonnets, Brandon Lee's specter coming to life out of the paintings the art club brought in of their favorite gods, Kanye West had a similar story to Brandon Lee but he was competing with Kobe Bryant, etc. At one point the Garth Brooks Southern Baptist regaled the Viking Kiss fangirl with a story about a land at the bottom of a cesspool "a bubblin and a bustlin". They didn't know they were in a cesspool, and they didn't know that at any point, that membrane surrounding their civilization could pop and destroy their civilization. Ergo, Garth Brooks is better than Gene Simmons. There was also a high school musical with satanist mimes and country girls singing about Tijuanna hay rides. I think it was one of the most brilliant things I've seen this year. And I've seen a lot this year, I think.



• held my vomit in a bumpy car ride back home drunk. Don't drink and drive unless you're good at it. Now I have a splitting headache and am eating Singapore noodles and drinking lots of water. Drunk food and preventative measures for tomorrow's hangover. I really ought not to eat these noodles. I've been really self-conscious lately about my weight. Since I tore my hamstring, I've been inactive, lazy, slothish, whatever. I haven't been acrobatic. I haven't done a million push ups a day, ran seven miles, and then practiced how many times I can rotate in the air after a kick before landing. I can't. Really, I don't know how to burn these carbs. I've been checking out that Zone Diet the fat guy from Mexico is doing, but I doubt I'd be able to follow that. I think you have to pay money for people to make you a schedule or something, anyways. At least officially. My wrist on my left hand has been hurting when I try and put pressure on my palm, too. I don't know what this pain is, but it is the worst. I can't do push ups. Well, I can. i just have to do them on my knuckles.



• finished a book which I will forget most of in the morning. Oh, and I also recognized that I may have the worst memory... I would say in the world, but I hate cliches, and I'm sure amnesiacs have worse memory. But I have bad memory. It makes me want to kill myself. You have no clue. I will never amount to anything real and I can't stay awake for regular jobs. I'm so fucking spoiled. And I can't memorize Chinese characters because, a few months later, they all look familiar but you just can't remember what they mean. I was trying to read the newspaper tonight. It didn't work out. I don't know if it will ever work out. I need to take one more Chinese class to get my degree, an independent study, but I have no clue what to make it on. I was hoping to avoid having to read some piece of classical literature or something because my Chinese word processor, the one which lets me type in the pinyin and choose from all the possible choices and stuff-- that's expired now. It won't let me scroll over the texts and read what the pinyin is anymore, thus further distancing me from written to spoken Chinese. Sometimes I get really, really depressed and feel worthless, then I realize that everyone is like that all the time and I'm so fucking full of myself.

And that's what I did tonight. And apparently, at 5:30 in the morning, I still felt awake enough to type out a glimpse into my life. I wish I had musical talent. I would settle for being drop dead gorgeous, though. Both would be preferable.