how come you say it like you're right?

"however tragic they appear, artworks tend a priori toward affirmation"

-Adorno, Aesthetic Theory

*

If you hate the taste of wine
why do you drink it till you’re blind,
and if you swear that there’s no truth,
and who cares,
how come you say it like you’re right?

Why are you scared to dream of God,
when it’s salvation that you want...
You see stars that clear
have been dead for years
but the idea just lives on.
In our wheels that roll around
as we move over the ground
and all day this seems
with an in between
a past and future town.

We are nowhere
and it’s now;
We are nowhere
and it’s now......

-from "We are Nowhere and It's Now," on the Bright Eyes album I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning

*

"I'm not a time-space person" said a guy described in my notes as "purple shirt."

No?
So can we assume you're somewhere else, or perhaps here tomorrow, and ignore you? (Purple shirt tended to dominate, even preclude, conversation.)

*

I could listen to this song too much and probably am. I'll be sick of it eventually.

The number of people who declare with certainty that the concept upon which their own position is based is an outdated construct of the unintelligent sometimes seems surprising to me. The rest of the time, I don't even notice.

Are other people nowhere too these days?

The joggers are always rushing from nowhere to nowhere, up and down the hill. They look more compelled than thrilled...
They want to fear that they'll be late or miss out and are secretly suppressing the realization that there's nothing to miss.

*

A few weeks ago, I went to a gallery opening to see a show a friend curated. Another show was opening the same evening, and getting very little attention, so after browsing the room and reading the artist's statement, I spent some time talking with the artist. The artist's statement hinted vaguely at abstractions and seemed largely unrelated to the work or anything the artist said. I asked a few gently probing questions in an attempt to draw some connections between the work and the statement, but the artist seemed baffled by the very concepts to which he referred in his own statement. Did he hire someone else to write it? Perhaps he's simply having trouble thinking in words...We can only think in so many terms at once, I guess. But this artist seems to me to be in trouble. He doesn't seem to be expressing anything in any medium...perhaps that's the point, but I'd be more interested in giving him credit for such unparalleled genius if he admitted having a concept...

*

Last weekend I spend a few hours at a sculpture workshop. I'm a non-practicing artist though half the time I don't feel like an artist and occasionally I make something...
I seem to be spending a good bit of time thinking in shapes these days, and I get it out of my system in clay. Handbuilt ceramic sculpture doesn't seem like much sometimes, and I work small, which means my pieces have to work especially hard to avoid a distinct feeling of insignificance. To see a respected sculptor's small, handbuilt work is a treat. In the course of responding to a question about what motivates her, Mikey says...
You hope someone will see it and respond to it.
Michaelene Walsh images
She had a slide of doll heads, waiting on a warehouse shelf, the optimists hoping for bodies?
The idea of juxtapositions to create/explore tension (nightmare dolls, oversized unnatural ice-cream cones and candy, birds on hearts) speaks to where we are and to us where we are...
It's a good thing I have dishes and laundry and, dare I admit it, truth.

this is my life

"Just a fond farewell to a friend...
this is not my life"
Elliott Smith

So do I stay here working and worrying and miss the funeral of a great aunt who felt more like a grandmother, who always whistled while she did dishes, loved "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" and worked to connect scattered relatives, like us, transplanted south years ago? It's a thousand miles away. I don't have time for this...For four days of driving. I've got work to do. Lots of it. Papers to write. Papers to grade.

***

That was as far as I got last week. I packed my clothes in 40 minutes and spent 20 gathering the papers and books I should have worked on. Of course I didn't get much done. OK--I admit it. I did virtually nothing. And now I'm paying for it.

But some things are more important than school, hard as that is to believe sometimes. I wouldn't have missed it. I wouldn't even skip the drive with my parents, through the upstate New York throughway in the winter, past the severely pruned vineyards and the Erie canal, and that strange hill covered with what appear to be plastic pipe periscopes.

You just don't stay in your apartment listening to music and thinking and writing. Work is not meant to justify missing life itself. Even in my current state of anxiety, I recognize the value of the time away from this bubble, in the real world... with the great aunt (now the only surviving sibling of thirteen) and cousins who made room for us during our stay and at the wake, where I saw pictures of my grandmother I've never seen before. She looked so happy on the beach.

As soon as I walked into the funeral home, I remembered the wallpaper in the hallway. My earliest memories about death are in this place. They haven't redecorated, the building is still drafty, and they still have bowls of hard candy scattered about.

"That last time I saw you..." (was probably in this room, at a funeral....)

Yeah. I'm not a kid anymore. Shocking isn't it? So you meet people who knew you 20 years ago, 10 years ago. You talk about yourself, and try to mitigate whatever your proud father is telling his family about you, and think-- I've got great parents, and so what if I want to hide behind the flower arrangements now and then. wht-- who cares if everyone thinks I'm amazing.

***

I had an extra hot latte with a double shot today, and as I tried to do some research in the cafe, "Somewhere over the rainbow" came on...a version I've heard countless times and will always associate with my great aunt. I couldn't have imagined a more cliched conclusion, but I guess I don't have to.

procrastinating

It is a dark and stormy night.
*
Quote of the day: "She had that unique ability to--before she finished her first sentence-- alienate everyone else in the room."
*
I have so much to do that I'm perpetually in a near-panicked state. But now that I have an evening to work, I can accomplish nothing. I have nervous energy, which is normal for the last couple of weeks of the quarter. I need the adrenaline to deal with everything, but instead of selecting one small, do-able task, my mind is flitting from one insurmountable task to the next. In an effort to focus, I have some fairly distracting music on. Sometimes that helps, because I have to devote a bit of energy to listening to the music and not getting too caught up in it. It's not helping. I'm just getting distracted by both the music and major tasks.

Thanksgiving eve

I'm home for Thanksgiving. I'm in my brother's room, listening to his music on his computer (The Decembrists). I've been getting ready for a family dinner tomorrow--making cornbread for dressing, a double batch of angel biscuits, four pie crusts. (Yes I make pie crust by hand. It's worth it, and as I proved this afternoon, it's possible to make four at once, which is pretty efficient.)

My parents and I snuck German chocolate cake for dinner...It's for tomorrow, but my cousin dropped it off early. We couldn't resist.

A few minutes ago, I finished peeling and slicing the apples for tomorrow morning's breakfast pie, a Thanksgiving tradition from my dad. We always make apple pie for my brother--with peeled apples and sugar. He loves apple pie... He usually has it for his birthday rather than a cake and as a little boy managed to convince my then health-food obsessed mother that apple pie was just not the same with wheat bran crust, apple peels, and minimal or alternative sweetener. "Come on Mom! It's not even worth it if you won't use plenty of real sugar--and peel the apples." This year, the kid isn't here, but of course I'm making his apple pie anyway...They don't so much celebrate Thanksgiving in England, and what is marketed as "apple pie" is very nice but something else altogther. We'll have to eat apple pie for him.

So, my apples are draining, my crust is chilling, and I'm loading the dishwasher again. "I'm thinking about having a cup of coffee," my mom says. My mom doesn't drink coffee at night. What's up? "Oh- it's 10, I guess it's too late, but it does sound good... If your brother were here, he'd convince me." I offer to make some coffee so she can lie awake twitching and thinking about him.

That kid is charismatic. He convinces people that whatever he wants to do is really in their best interests. "Oh come on- It'll be fun." He'd make super strong coffee, it would smell good, and we'd all have some and stay up for hours. We'd probably go to the midnight showing of the latest Harry Potter movie. Yeah-- it would be fun.

Happy Thanksgiving kid.

government censors confidential info about extraterrestrials?

Without government censorship, "People could read confidential information about aliens in daily newspapers."

stream of consciousness

My grandmother loved Whitman. She would often look at the bookshelf and request her copy of Leaves of Grass. I hadn't read any Whitman myself until assigned it last week...

I'm having tea; it's 5 p.m. and from my bedroom window, I see that for the first time in two days, the sky is not gray.

Instead of reading Leaves of Grass, I'm thinking about my grandmother, who taught me how to play dominoes, and let me win, though she never let my mother win.

I'm listening to NPR; a man explores his lobotomy...His step-mother hated him, it seems. He talks to his father about it for the first time. He attains a sense of peace upon realizing that his lobotomy did not damage his soul. He seems incredibly forgiving, and I wonder why...That lobotomy may have left his soul intact, but there must be something wrong with somebody who is not consumed by warping anger and a furious sense of justice?

Perhaps this unbidden question points toward the cynicism that most people have about faith. It just doesn't make sense unless you have it, since, though logical to a point, the phenomenon inherently involves the not knowable. My favorite definition of faith: "Faith is being sure of what you hope for" (Heb. 11:1).


*

I'm making a new mix. Today, my old mixes are old.
Can I get from "By the Way" (Red Hot Chili Peppers) to Madeleine Peyroux's "Don't Cry Baby" in 9 songs...I selected the songs on intuition, apparently based on my perception of the mood of the piece, ignoring specific lyrics, which I don't tend to remember very well anyway.
*
the Petrarchan conventions:
devotion by the lover
rejection by the beloved
acceptance of the pain of rejection
ambivalence to desire
hyperbole
trials at the lady's hand
love as spiritual
*

mouth of the river

Slightly more to the left is the house where my brother was born...To the right, toward the Atlantic, is my first home.

Read-through?

(I stole the end from a previous post...)
My speakers are blaring the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I have a subwoofer in the trunk, which I try to hide because I don’t want to be flirted at by guys who are attracted by my sound system. I wouldn’t have paid extra for this noise-making capacity, but the previous owner of the car thought the sound system was the selling point of the vehicle and claimed to be sad to part with the car because of it. Whatever. The driver’s side window won’t roll down and there’s a crack in the windshield.
“This life is more than just a read-through...” And I’m sitting here, stuck at a red-light, tired and wasting my afternoon. I’m a perfectionist and have always had a difficult time achieving an appropriate balance of priorities. Currently, this problem is manifesting itself in an obsession with fruitless research for my senior paper.
I’m an English major analyzing marriage in the six completed novels of Jane Austen. Her novels are absolutely full of marriages, so I’ve narrowed my focus. I have identified three marriage categories: marriages motivated by the lack of options for females, lover-mentor marriages, and what I’m calling “equal partnership” marriages. I haven’t narrowed my focus enough.
Fellow honor’s program colleagues, a generally obsessive bunch, are throwing together papers and posters. The scientific orientation of the program committee resulted in a set of guidelines requiring a poster for the public presentation of “method,” analysis of evidence, charts and graphs. I don’t have charts and graphs, and analysis of evidence is a 50 page paper. My real problem, though, is with my method.
I am looking at more books than I have time to make use of, ordering articles and books through inter-library loan at a rate that confounds the freshman library workers and garners unwanted attention from the inter-library loan director. Worst of all I’m driving through Lexington traffic, hot bright sun in my face, heading toward the UK library. I’m spending Friday afternoon heading down I-75 for more books when my room is already full of them. I have stacks of books, notebooks, note-cards, outlines, drafts, random ideas scribbled on scrap paper.
For some reason I have decided that I don’t have enough books. Perhaps the problem is that the ones I have are not the right ones.
My AC is on, but it’s hot. I feel as if I’m suffocating in a greenhouse, but my fingers on the steering wheel are somehow chilled. The sun is putting me to sleep through the windshield even though I’m on caffeine. I had coffee this morning in the student center between theory and philosophy and a Coke with lunch. If I drink soft drinks frequently, I don’t enjoy them, and it seems incredibly wasteful of good health to not enjoy a Coke. But it’s Friday, and I generally choose to indulge myself to celebrate the completion of another week.
I want desperately to fall asleep.
What am I doing here, getting more books? I don’t really need them. Do I really think I have time to read another dozen books on the subject? Do I really expect to find something stunning in any of the books I’m seeking? Does it matter if I do?
I have stumbled upon the real question, the one that drives me to such avoidance tactics as this library pilgrimage.
I’ve staked the past 20 years or so on this educational project. I’ve been in school almost my entire life. I’m about to graduate from college having never made less than an “A,” and I’m feeling simultaneously annoyed with myself for wasting so much of my time playing along and with everyone else for failing to recognize my achievements.
What do I want? Recognition for playing the game well?
--
I think I’m trying to drive myself crazy. I am listening to the same CD over and over—the same songs. Two of the songs are extraordinarily satisfying to me for some indefinable reason. Conversely, a couple annoy me excessively. I either skip them or listen to them and enjoy being temporarily irritated. This irritation is a sort of catharsis for me, I think. I don’t want to recognize that my own choices have made me miserable, so I look for something manageable. I could skip the exasperating tracks on my CD, but I don’t. My destiny is in my hands.
I’ve been doing this for two straight days, trying to drive myself crazy. This afternoon, I tried to convince myself that I was delighted to have the opportunity to spend my time writing a literary analysis paper. It’s a lie, though, one I recognized even as I repeated it to myself like a mantra.
A few minutes ago, I decided to give my desk chair a spin and focused my eyes at a fixed altitude as the chair rotated. As a result, I became quite dizzy and slightly nauseated. I knew this would happen, and I felt the growing discomfort as I spun, but did not stop the chair. Oh, no, I seem to want to make myself miserable.
I ate six Cadbury eggs with cold coffee this afternoon. Then I decided to put on some eyeliner, which I rarely use, just for the fun of it. I started playing boggle by myself. It was unsatisfying, with no one to exchange words with afterwards, but I went at it with enthusiasm for two rounds. My roommate got back and we had grape-fruit juice with spicy Pringles that tasted vaguely of soy sauce. We made tea, and I had more chocolate eggs. (No wonder I feel lousy.) Then we played a few rounds of boggle. I read a page of the dictionary in search of new words in order to postpone my return to my paper.
--
It’s Saturday afternoon, a beautiful day. I’m still in school. I’m at my computer researching for a presentation I’m giving Monday and listening to the Red Hot Chili Peppers again. The sun is too bright, my feet are cold, and I’m tired.
“This life is more than just a read-through…”
--
Déjà vu nightmare: I’m stuck in traffic again. The light won’t turn green. Finally, it does, but under the roar of the AC and the speakers, my car has stalled. I pump the gas and flood my engine….
Wait a sec. Wake up. I’m not so stupid that I can think of nothing to do with my life but pour it down the drain. I mean, this idea of educating myself isn’t completely selfish or an utter waste of time. Right?
--
I’m alone in the world, listening to distant traffic, trains in the night, and twittering birds who are happy because they can fly and don’t remember the existence of killer cats and the fact that they may be carrying the latest deadly diseases, Asian Bird Flu or West Nile Virus.